I will up you by saying that even your prediction is silly, for using the word "lifetime".

Not lifetime. Right now. Just one week of StableDiffusion in the wild has seen the development of many clients, GUIs, optimizations, plugins for commercial software, editing workflows, the list is endless.

The speed of it all is dazzling. It will not take long before this is assembled into a smooth experience that runs everywhere, with obvious end state being your phone.

And that's still just artistic image generation. The open sourcing of it means people can make any vertical, precisely optimized for a particular (commercial) domain.

Almost all shortcomings seem to be crushed in no time. Bad at drawing eyes? Here's a new encoder that fixes it.

The creator of StableDiffusion indicated to soon tackle music generation and if I remember correctly, even poetry. And there's 3D and video.

The ultimate end state: if you can imagine it, it can generate it. Not only are we much closer to that point than society realizes, we're also moving at an exponential speed towards it.

It may be like WWW or cryptocurrency, where it was great the first 10 years then started getting ugly. Could happen much faster this time though.

> They are the most impressive software achievements in decades and anyone who has a “meh” reaction will absolutely end up looking silly.

With the risk of looking silly, I declare "meh" once more, just as I "meh"-eh when GPT-3 came out.

The so-called "AI" is not fundamentally different from the AI of the 80s, it's just that now we have much better hardware. The main problem of the past AI winters still remains - the existing algorithms focus on statistical methods, which can be rather inexact. Imagine a nuclear plant controlled by an AI, or an airplane flown by a neural network. They completely lack reasoning capability and therefore you can't trust they will be able to adapt to unpredictable situations.

incremental improvements are easy to dismiss but it can be hard to tell when some critical mass of utility is reached. The first cars were electric (and steam-powered) but it took 100 years to supplant ICE (steam is next /s). the components for drone technology aren't new but control systems and batteries needed time to improve, VR has incrementally improved since the 80's, even the internet was around for 20 years before incremental improvement brought us the web...

It sure looks to me like this new development is hailed as a leap, rather than incremental improvement. Although I'm judging just by reading the comments in the HN bubble.

Either way, I think the current "AI" is fundamentally limited by the statistical approach to problem solving. Without any reasoning capabilities, no amount of incremental improvements will change the fact that neural networks are simply making guesses based on existing data sets. Nothing magical or revolutionary, it's the same thing we've known for many decades.

This is happening with images first, but I can see how this might be able to be leveraged for all kinds of things. The speed at which society might be transformed could be astounding. But it won't be distributed evenly, not everyone is prepared to take full advantage of these benefits. This is early 2000's internet distruption x2 in half the time.

BUT it will likely be disrupting the upper middle class more than the lower middle classes, as it's mostly disrupting to creative work. Upper middle class people have a louder voice.

It is capable of surprising beauty. It will however be as beautiful as the disaster that is modern Facebook -- and the misinformation will be more convincing and subtler.

I think that the cause of that is unlikely to be Stable Diffusion but the lack of education that allows so many educated people in this thread to mistake images for art. In that way a lot of the damage has already been done.