4.2 gigabytes of pure knowledge

Andy Salerno created a digital painting with Stable Diffusion, a new open source image synthesis model that allows anyone with a PC and a decent GPU to create almost any image they can describe:

Andy Salerno’s masterpiece created “with literally dozens of minutes of experience”

Salerno’s step-by-step guide is very straightforward and worth the review.

Most remarkable perhaps is that Stable Diffusion is small enough to be used by almost anyone:

4.2 gigabytes.

That’s the size of the model that has made this recent explosion possible.

4.2 gigabytes of floating points that somehow encode so much of what we know.

4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything

Stable Diffusion was trained on about 5 billion images and cost about $600k on GPUs leased from AWS.