The first AI painting startup on the verge of bankruptcy has appeared. The founder: It can't make any money at all.

AIGC entrepreneurship in 2022 can be said to be a world of ice and fire.

Someone raised US$101 million and built a unicorn company in two years with a valuation of nearly US$1 billion.

Someone already had a premonition of the danger of "bankruptcy" after only four months after setting up the company.

Just a few days ago, Stock AI, a startup company that provides free AI-generated pictures, released an open letter from the CEO to users.

It contains several key messages:

• First of all, the Stock AI free gallery will be closed;
• Secondly, the user's subscription will be canceled and refunds will be made based on the remaining subscription time;
• Finally, users can still access their accounts before January 15, 2023 , invoices, purchases and favorites.

#Standing on the forefront of AIGC may not necessarily be favored by capital and the market. It seems that Stock AI has to reorganize its business and rethink its direction.

Founded in 2022, ended in 2022

After the news of closing the business platform spread, many people paid attention to the fact that this was a startup that was only four months old. company.

In September 2022, StockAI released its first tweet after opening its official account: "StockAI is an AI-driven stock photo library and generator that finds exactly what you need. image. If it doesn't exist, we will create it for you immediately."

But StockAI founder Danny Postma admitted: "Like Stock AI AI-powered startups are expensive. The current paying user base cannot cover these costs, so we have to make changes."

The existing platform will be in Operations will cease in January 2023. However, StockAI will launch a new platform in the first quarter of 2023.

Talking about what changes the new platform will bring, Danny Postma revealed that it will mainly be a shift from user-generated content to AI-generated content curated by the platform. On the one hand, the function of generating new AI images for users is cancelled; on the other hand, after renewing the license, all content is available for free download.

Industry Exploration under the AIGC Wave

2022 is the year when the AIGC market explodes, and AIGC is named one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs in 2022 by "Science". Both academia and industry have set off a wave of AI-generated content, and many startups have been established.

Currently, AI-generated content mainly includes images, text, audio, etc. Among them, AI-generated images are one of the most popular research directions. From DALL・E 2 to Stable Diffusion, a number of models for generating images from text have exploded this year. In August 2022, an AI-generated painting called "Space Opera" attracted great attention. While discussing artistic copyright, people also see the market prospects of "AI painting", and more and more companies are entering this track.

The painting "Space Opera" that won the digital art category championship at the Colorado Art Fair in the United States was generated by the text-to-image generation model Midjourney.

As early as 2020, a company called Stability AI was established. In 2022, the company announced that it had received US$101 million in financing, becoming a new entrant. Unicorn, with a valuation of up to $1 billion. The company is known as the company behind Stable Diffusion because it provides the computing power behind the Stable Diffusion content generation model that can quickly generate high-quality images on consumer GPUs. Although the copyright issue of Stable Diffusion has caused controversy, Stability AI is still regarded as the leader in the AI painting track.

In addition to new unicorns like Stability AI and technology giants such as OpenAI, there are many small startups ready to take off. Data from the financial data platform Wind shows that before November 2022, concepts related to "AIGC" rarely appeared in investor questions and answers for listed companies. After November, AIGC suddenly became a keyword in investor questions and answers. This indicates that a number of AI painting companies will emerge in the domestic AIGC market.

In addition to generating images, AI is also improving the efficiency of generating digital information content such as text and audio. For example, in the direction of text generation, there are powerful models like ChatGPT and highly applied writing tools like Jasper AI.

In addition, the diffusion model, as one of the core technologies behind AIGC, also brings new possibilities to other fields. For example, in December 2022, David Baker's team at the University of Washington released the RF diffusion model, innovatively integrating the diffusion model into protein design. This type of thinking combined with basic science has opened up a new landscape for the field of AIGC.

There is no doubt that AIGC is causing an industrial change in the way content is produced.

How to run a business model

Stable Diffusion is a powerful, free and open source text-to-image generator. It is said that Satable Diffusion used 4,000 A100 graphics cards for its initial training. This kind of "financial resources" is obviously not something that ordinary startups can possess.

Once upon a time, OpenAI also had huge investment in research and development, while adhering to the original intention of "free and open". But later OpenAI was acquired by Microsoft for $1 billion, which turned many open source tools into paid products, including DALL・E 2. It is generally believed that OpenAI is no longer "Open" but has become a profit-oriented enterprise.

But Stable Diffusion not only fully opens up the image copyright, but even opens up the source code, and allows users to use the tool for free, allowing subsequent entrepreneurs to use open source frameworks to build more open and A vibrant content ecosystem. For this reason, many startups build products based on open source Stable Diffusion.

Even so, the AIGC startup’s business model remains to be seen.

Like Stability AI and Stock AI, both will allow users to pay on demand when using the "AI image editing function". DreamStudio is Stability AI’s consumer-oriented product, which currently has more than 1 million registered users. In addition, Stability AI is further exploring business models, including developing short videos and cartoons using AI. In contrast, Stock AI should not have such a large user base, nor such strong financial strength.

At the same time, such companies whose main business is "AIGC" will also face moral and ethical controversies - for example, Stable Diffusion makes it easier to generate violent and pornographic images It's easy, and the content often contains a lot of real-life characters. The copyright dispute has brought Stable Diffusion a lot of criticism, with people complaining that it's stealing artists' creative work.

Where will AIGC startups go in 2023?

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