The parent comment was referring to free ($0 a month) models. With those, companies don't need to plan around the possibility that Stability AI hikes up the price afterwards.
Just released video, sdxl turbo and 3d, code and more coming
Very positive reaction so far and we will still do our grants for OSS and do OSS collaborations, done over 10m A100 hours over last year
Launches next few days https://x.com/emostaque/status/1732197072290353455?s=46
With a bit less snark; I think the pricing structure is reasonable, but that doesn't mean customers won't eventually get screwed over by it. See the Unity fiasco from earlier this year (which was backed out, but serves well as an example).
The base membership is even separate from other services, designed to support open model development.
They learned from the Russians. The Cuban missile crisis wasn't about Russian missiles in Cuba, it was about establishing an air base in Cuba. The missiles were the "price shock" item, and the airbase was the goal. If the Russians had put in just an airbase, it was very likely they never would have kept it.
And 15% of revenue after you pass the "tiny startup" thresholds?
This looks to be shaping up as the same hook that Unity has, except you have to pay for model infra and engineering in addition to the product development costs.
It'd be nice if your company morphed into an open source HuggingFace + Together.ai / Replicate.ai where the model code is truly 100% open source, with no commercial use or revenue restriction clause.
Basically, I'm eagerly awaiting the Gitlab of AI to emerge.
I assume you have investor / revenue targets, though. And it's your company.
Amazon Prime but for generative AI, large companies have signed up for huge deals already and everyone has been happy with pricing, its designed to be simple base then we upsell other services but focus on research.
This lets us grow with the market and will do models of every modality for every country, including new BERTs and more.
We fund huge amounts of OSS, gave over 10m A100 hours in the last year and almost our collaborations are open.
For the stable series we are making it simple and scalable so we don't need to work against the people using the models.