I mean, this sub and its amazing community wouldn't be here if it were not for Stability AI and Stable Diffusion. I personally created an account on Reddit just so I could join r/LocalLLaMA and r/StableDiffusion. I remember the first day I tried SD1.4 on my shiny new RTX 3070 Ti. I couldn't contain my excitement as I was going through Aitrepreneur’s video on how to install AUTOMATIC1111.

I never had Conda or PyTorch installed on my machine before. There was no ChatGPT to write me a guide on how to install everything or troubleshoot a failure. I followed Nerdy Rodent's videos on possible issues I could face, and I heavily relied on this sub for learning.

Then, I remember the first image I generated. That first one is always special. I took a few minutes to think of what I wanted to write, and I went for "Lionel Messi riding a bicycle." (Damn, I feel so embarrassed now that I am writing this. Please don't judge me!).

I cannot thank Stability AI's amazing team enough for opening a new world for me—for us. Every day, new AI tutorials would drop on YouTube, and every day, I was excited. I vividly remember the first Textual Inversion I trained, my first LoRA, and my first model finetune on Google Colab. Shortly after, SD 1.5 dropped. I never felt closer to YouTubers before; I could feel their excitement as they went through the material. That excitement felt genuine and was contagious.

And then, the NovelAI models were leaked. I downloaded the torrent with all the checkpoints, and the floodgates for finetunes opened. Do you guys remember Anything v3 and RevAnime? Back then, our dream was simple and a bit naive: we dreamed of the day where we would run Midjourney v3-level image quality locally 🤣.

Fast forward 6 months, and Llama models were leaked (7B, 13B, 33B, and 65B) with their limited 2K context window. Shortly after, Oobabooga WebUI was out and was the only frontend you could use. I could barely fit Llama 13B in my 8GB of VRAM. GPTQ quants were a pain in the ass. Regardless, running Llama locally always put a smile on my face.

If you are new to the LLM space, let me tell you what our dream was back then: to have a model as good as ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo. Benchmarks were always against 3.5!! Whenever a new finetune dropped, the main question remained: how good is it compared to ChatGPT? As a community, we struggled for over a year to get a local model that finally beat ChatGPT (I think it was Mixtral 8x7B).

This brings me to the current time. We have many frontier open-source models both in LLM and image/video generation, and neither Meta nor Stability AI made any of them. They both shot themselves in the foot and then effectively committed suicide. They could've owned the open-source space, but for whatever reason, they botched that huge opportunity. Their work contributed so much to the world, and it saddens me to see that they have already sailed into the sunset. Did you know that the first works by DeepSeek and other Chinese labs were heavily built upon the Llama architecture? They learned from Llama and Stable Diffusion, and in 2025, they just killed them.

I am sorry if I seem emotional, because I am. About 6 months ago, I deleted the last Llama-based model I had. 3 months ago, I deleted all SD1.5-based models. And with the launch of the Z-model, I know that soon I will be deleting all Stable Diffusion-based models again. If you had told me 3 years ago that by 2025 both Meta and Stability AI would disappear from the open-source AI space, I wouldn't have believed you in a million years. This is another reminder that technology is a ruthless world.

What are your thoughts? Perhaps you can share your emotional experiences as well. Let this post be a tribute to two otherwise awesome AI labs.