Computex The third version of text-to-image model Stable Diffusion will be released into public preview on June 12.
The date was revealed at the Computex conference in Taiwan today, where Stability AI CTO and co-interim CEO Christian Laforte revealed the news as he joined AMD CEO Lisa Su on stage.
Laforte told the event “A lot of thought went into this” – especially considerations of AI safety – so his firm feels the revised model is ready for wider testing.
He framed the release as a change in the way AI models are developed.
“It used to be that the frontier of research led to these models,” he noted. “Now it seems like a natural evolution. By releasing models openly, we let people unlock new use cases.”
Laforte didn’t offer technical details of Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3) but used black and white images of a human hand hovering over an ornate acoustic guitar’s strings to illustrate the advances in this edition – one created with SD XL 1.0 in 2023, and the other made with SD3.
“Anything that involves hands and repeating patterns is really hard,” he explained, praising the image created with SD3 as offering “more realistic details like the shape of a guitar and hands.”
The Register was able to squeeze off a quick snap of the images Laforte showed.
Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 vs SD3 demo – Click to enlarge
The co-CEO rated the above as containing “a few imperfections here and there,” but “a big change” made possible by a multimodal diffusion transformer that allows it to better understand prompts.
Laforte also showed off images that he explained were generated by SD3 in less time than it took to enter the prompt.
He attributed the model’s improved prowess to hardware offering more high-bandwidth memory. “Ninety-two gigabytes of HBM is a game changer,” he beamed, before expressing hunger for even more powerful hardware.
“We need more memory and compute,” he declared – an observation that saw AMD’s Lisa Su observe “I think you need some GPUs.” Su heartily approved Laforte’s news that SD3 will run just fine on the Ryzen 300 AI CPUs Su announced in the same keynote.
Stability AI has created a “weights list” for would-be users. Interestingly, the signup form includes a field for a Discord ID – perhaps reflecting SD’s popularity among game developers. ®