On the other hand, this is nice for anyone who wants to play with these networks locally and does not have a nvidia GPU with 6+ gigabytes of VRAM. I can run this on an old laptop, even if it takes a while.
SD 1.x works in stable-diffusion-web-ui (aka, A1111, one of the more popular frontends) with (reportedly) as little as 2GB of VRAM (I’ve personally used 1.5 and 2.1 without any problems with a 4GB card.)
You can even run CLIP or (if its fast enough) llama.cpp on the CPU to contribute to the network, if you wish.