A newly formed coalition of open source AI developers has ambitious plans to launch a new AI model that could compete directly with Stable Diffusion and its latest controversial version its.

The Open Model Initiative (OMI) was launched last week by Invoke, an AI Create platform created for professional Studios, Comfy.org, which focuses on ComfyUI development, and CivitAI, The world's largest Stable Diffusion repository. This group is leading a community effort to develop open source AI models for image, video, and audio generation.

“I hope OMI will launch a new next-generation model that the community can get behind and build support for within the next three to six months – an ambitious goal for a new organization, but I confident that we can achieve it,” Kent Keirsey, CEO of Invoke AI, told Decrypt.

OMI aims to develop open source models that are of equal or higher quality than proprietary models (like Ideogram or MidJourney) but without restrictive licensing terms.

“Comfy tends to take advantage of a better designed SD3.” CivitAI stated in a recent post.

This initiative comes on the heels of Stability AI's launch of SD3, which was criticized for its restrictive licensing terms. Although the Stable Diffusion family of AI models has been very popular, SD3's license was considered so restrictive that it led to it being banned from CivitAI.

To prevent this from happening again, the organization advocates truly open source development and will likely adopt the MIT or Apache-2 license, which ensures open, unrestricted models, only comply with the minimum conditions.

“We believe open source is the best way to ensure that AI benefits everyone,” the members said in an open letter. “By collaborating, we can deliver competitive, high-quality models with open licenses that drive AI innovation, are free to use, and meet community needs.”

Addressing ethical concerns, the initiative also commits to developing a baseline model without prior training capabilities such as “recognizing non-consensual artists” and “creating images similar to Individuals are not allowed to consent.”

The initiative has attracted significant support, with over 1,000 members joining their Discord server. “We have received over 100 requests for participation and support in just the last 24 hours,” Keirsey said.

Regarding funding, Keirsey said the initiative will not pursue venture capital but will rely on community support and the business models of its founding members.

“OMI will not accept investments, because the goal of the initiative is to build open models, not make profits,” he said, “We have seen what happens when profits become the driving factor push behind organizations founded on the principle of an open AI approach.”

Each member of OMI will maintain their own business structure despite their participation in the group.

Robin Ken of ComfyUI says that their role in the mission to “democratize AI” is at the tooling layer, unlike other initiatives like Stability, Mistral or Meta, which focus more on model development. He also confirmed that Comfy is more than a side project and has financial backing.

“Comfy will forever be open source,” Ken told Decrypt. “We are VC-backed and plan to monetize consulting/business support.”

Ken, Alex Goodwin and the anonymous co-founder of Comfy have left Stability AI to focus on developing and growing Comfy.org, along with other developers.

 said it will focus initially on organizing volunteers, deciding on governance structures, and selecting data sets with the help of the community.

LAION – an AI company that has compiled datasets of images and annotations extracted from the web that have been used to train multiple Stable Diffusion models – was initially announced as a founding member of OMI but was later removed.

Source: https://tapchibitcoin.io/lien-minh-ai-ma-nguon-mo-omi-len-ke-hoach-cho-mo-hinh-moi-de-canh-tranh-voi-stable-diffusion. html