Stability AI Ltd. announced today that it’s going all-in on open source with the release of StableStudio, an open-source release of DreamStudio, the company’s premier interface for its art-generating artificial intelligence Stable Diffusion model.

After its release, DreamStudio quickly became a one-stop-shop for accessing all of Stability AI’s text-to-image generating capabilities without the need for users to write any code. Users could quickly generate artwork by typing in prompts to test out new features as they were released. In April it was upgraded with the Stable Diffusion XL beta model, which is capable of producing even more vivid and photorealistic imagery than ever before.

In the announcement, the company said the move is part of a “dedication to advancing open-source development within the AI ecosystem,” which has been inherent to Stable Diffusion’s bottom line since August 2022 when it initially released its art generator model as open source. Last month, Stable Diffusion released a family of open-source large language models, collectively known as StableLM, that can generate text and code from user prompts. The company also said it plans to integrate its StableVicuna chat interface for StableLM into the product.

“We believe the best way to expand upon that impressive reach is through open, community-driven development rather than a private iteration of a closed-source product,” the company said in its announcement.

Much of StableStudio’s goal is to provide a way for the community to join the AI ecosystem, the same way that releasing Stable Diffusion’s model open source did. With the open-source release of StableStudio, developers will be able to fully control the interface for Stable Diffusion to build and deploy their own plugins that can control the underlying AI models released by Stability AI.

That means developer feedback and development will help shape the future of StableStudio and its ecosystem. To do this, Stable Diffusion plans to move active development of the project into its public GitHub repository and the company plans to create bounties for improvements and new features.

The current tension in the industry between closed source and open source was brought to a head recently when one Google LLC engineer penned a letter saying that the open-source AI community was quickly encroaching on big generative AI developers such as Google’s Bard and OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. Although the letter spoke to the quality and capabilities of AI models, accessibility to models through the development of tools and features through the labor of open-source developers can also set a company apart in the market.

Stability stressed that even with the open-source release of StabilityStudio, DreamStudio will remain hosted on the company’s servers and it will stay up-to-date with new features and changes whenever possible.

Image: Stability AI