The technical license for the model was released by the CompVis group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
The development of Stable Diffusion was funded and shaped by the start-up company Stability AI. This marked a departure from previous proprietary text-to-image models such as DALL-E and Midjourney which were accessible only via cloud services. Its code and model weights have been released publicly, and it can run on most consumer hardware equipped with a modest GPU with at least 8 GB VRAM. Stable Diffusion is a latent diffusion model, a kind of deep generative artificial neural network. It was developed by researchers from the CompVis Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Runway with a compute donation by Stability AI and training data from non-profit organizations. It is primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions, though it can also be applied to other tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and generating image-to-image translations guided by a text prompt. Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022 based on diffusion techniques.
