Someone asked for a full breakdown of Stable Diffusion’s history, and I think it’s worth laying out. It started in Germany in 2021, a collaboration between a bunch of companies and universities, with the core idea being latent diffusion models. Runway and EleutherAI were both involved. Stability AI provided compute early on, then hired the original researchers, and now they’re the official maintainers.
The model uses what’s called an open license, with some usage restrictions under OpenRAIL. One thing a lot of people miss: starting from version 3.5, companies with annual revenue over a million dollars have to pay Stability.
This openness spawned a whole ecosystem—fine-tuned versions, upscalers, ControlNet, LoRA—all grown by the community. For me, understanding a model’s license and commercial boundaries is just as important as seeing how it performs, otherwise you’ll mess up and not even know where you went wrong.