The newly formed group of open source AI developers has big plans to launch a new AI model that can directly compete with Stable Diffusion.
The Open Model Initiative (OMI) was launched last week by Invoke, a generative AI platform for professional studios, Comfy.org, which focuses on the development of ComfyUI, and CivitAI, the world's largest Stable Diffusion repository. Now, the team is leading a community-driven effort to develop open-source AI models for image, video, and audio generation.
“I hope OMI can launch a new next-generation model that the community can get behind and build support over the next three to six months – a big goal for a new organization, but I'm confident we'll achieve it,” Kent Kersey, CEO of Invoke AI, told Decrypt.
OMI aims to develop open source models of equal or higher quality than proprietary models (such as Ideogram or Midjourney) but free from restrictive licensing terms.
“Comfy tends to use the better designed SD3.” CivitAI announced in a recent post.
This initiative comes shortly after SD3 was launched by Stability AI, which was criticized for its restrictive license terms. While the Stable Diffusion family of AI models is very popular, the SD3 license was so restrictive that it was banned from CivitAI.
To prevent this from happening again, the organization supports truly open source development and perhaps adopts the MIT or Apache-2 license, which ensures that truly open and non-restrictive models are subject to minimal conditions.
“We believe open source AI is the best way to benefit everyone,” the members said in an open letter.
Addressing ethical issues, he decided to develop a base model without pre-trained skills such as “recognition of unauthorized artist names” and “impersonation of non-compliant individuals”.
The initiative received massive support with over 1,000 members joining the Discord server. “We've had over 100 requests to join and support in the last 24 hours,” Keirsey told Decrypt.
As for funding, Kersey said the initiative is not chasing capital, but rather relies on community support and the business models of its founding members.
“The original objective is to build open models, not to make a profit, so OMI will not invest.” He said.
Each OMI member maintains his own business structure despite his involvement with the group.
“The mission to democratize AI is at the tools layer, unlike other initiatives like Stability, Mistral or Meta, which focus on developing models,” Robin Kane of CompUI told Decrypt. He also confirmed that Comfy is more than a side project and has financial support behind it.
“Comfy will remain open source forever,” Kane told Decrypt.
Ken, Alex Goodwin, and the founder of Comfy Anonymous, along with other developers, left Comfy.org to focus on the development and growth of Comfy.org.
The Open Model Initiative will initially focus on organizing volunteers, deciding on a governance structure and developing data sets with community support, he said.
LAION—which compiled many of the image and caption datasets used to train Stable Diffusion—was initially recognized as a founding member of OMI but was later removed.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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