Stability AI announces paid subscription for commercial use of its models -Gudstory

Stability AI, creator of the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, is now offering a subscription service that standardizes and transforms the way customers use its models for business purposes.

The company said the subscription “redefine[s]how it provides commercial rights to users, aiming to strike a balance between profitability and openness.” Sustainability AI’s membership offers three tiers: a free one for personal and research use; A $20 per month subscription for “creators, developers and startups with less than $1 million in annual revenue, $1 million in institutional funding and one million active users”; And an enterprise plan. All three provide early access to new AI models, but only members of the two paid tiers are allowed to use them commercially.

“As our company continues to mature and expand, the Stability AI membership will play an important role in funding our future research and development of the core model,” the company said in a blog post. the verge Contacted StabilityAI for more details, including how it previously dealt with commercial use.

Stability has so far been characterized by its openness. And sustainability CEO Imad Mostaq said venture beat The company is committed to releasing an “open model” with code and widgets that anyone can access. He compared this announcement to Meta’s release of Llama 2, which is billed as open source because it is available for free on various platforms but does not meet all the requirements of the Open Source Initiative’s open source definition.

But posters on the Stable Diffusion subreddit expressed confusion about what constitutes commercial use — including whether it only applies to people using models to produce their own generative AI services. , or if anyone who uses stable diffusion-generated images commercially will have to pay a fee. , This is complicated by the fact that AI-generated work has until now been denied copyright protection, making its value less certain.

Mostak accepted at xPreviously on Twitter, that the company is “still figuring out pricing to keep it simple.”

Sustainability AI already makes users pay for some of its models. It announced a pricing structure in September for access to static audio, it’s text-to-audio AI models.

Other AI companies also offer paid tiers to access more features. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus lets people use more advanced GPT-4 models and faster response times.