Stability AI has released Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, a text-to-image model the British startup calls its “most advanced text-to-image open model yet.” It has 2 billion parameters, and the company says it can turn out photorealistic pictures without a complicated workflow.
In plain terms, you do not need a data center to run it. Stability says the model has a low VRAM footprint, which makes it “ideal” for standard consumer GPUs without a drop in performance. Compared with the wider Stable Diffusion 3 family, which spans 800 million to 8 billion parameters, this one sits at the smaller end.
What changed
Text inside images has been a weak spot for generators for a long time. Stability described the accuracy of SD3 Medium’s typography as “unprecedented” and credits the Diffusion Transformer architecture for the gain. The company also says the model avoids the common artefacts that show up in hands and faces.
It was built to follow complicated prompts, including ones about spatial relationships, composition, actions and styles. Stability adds that the model can pick up fine details from small datasets, which helps when users want to customise it.
Christian Laforte, Stability’s co-CEO, told TNW the startup plans to keep improving the model. “Stability AI will continue to push the frontier of generative AI, and will aim to retain its lead at the forefront of image generation,” he said. Laforte also said the company is working on “multimodal efforts across video, audio, and language.”
Access and licensing
People can try SD3 Medium through Stability’s API now. The model weights come under an open non-commercial license and a low-cost Creator License. Companies that want to use it commercially at scale have to contact Stability about licensing.
A rough year for the company
The launch lands at a difficult time. Stability was founded in 2020 and was quickly hailed as one of the emerging leaders in generative AI. Stable Diffusion climbed alongside Midjourney and OpenAI’s Dall-E to the top of the new text-to-image field, and in 2022 investors valued the startup at $1bn.
Lawsuits and financial worries have since piled up. In March, the company’s CEO and founder, Emad Mostaque, resigned, saying he wanted to pursue decentralised AI.
The software itself has kept earning praise, and images from SD3 Medium suggest the quality has improved again.
