> How much would it cost the community to pretrain something with a more modern architecture?
Quite a lot. Search for "Chroma" (which was a partial-ish retraining of Flux Schnell) or Pony (which was a partial-ish retraining of SDXL). You're probably looking at a cost of at least tens of thousands or even hundred of thousands of dollars. Even bigger SDXL community finetunes like bigASP cost thousands.
And it's not only the compute that's the issue. You also need a ton of data. You need a big dataset, with millions of images, and you need it cleaned, filtered, and labeled.
And of course you need someone who knows what they're doing. Training these state-of-art models takes quite a bit of skill, especially since a lot of it is pretty much a black art.
> Search for "Chroma" (which was a partial-ish retraining of Flux Schnell)
Chroma is not simply a "partial-ish" retraining of Schnell, its a retraining of Schnell after rearchitecting part of the model (replacing a 3.3B parameter portion of the model with a 250M parameter replacement with different architecture.)
> You're probably looking at a cost of at least tens of thousands or even hundred of thousands of dollars.
For reference here, Chroma involved 105,000 hours of H100 GPU time [0]. Doing a quick search, $2/hr seems to be about the low end of pricing for H100 time per hour, so hundreds of thousands seems right for that model, and still probably lower for a base model from scratch.
Quite a lot. Search for "Chroma" (which was a partial-ish retraining of Flux Schnell) or Pony (which was a partial-ish retraining of SDXL). You're probably looking at a cost of at least tens of thousands or even hundred of thousands of dollars. Even bigger SDXL community finetunes like bigASP cost thousands.
And it's not only the compute that's the issue. You also need a ton of data. You need a big dataset, with millions of images, and you need it cleaned, filtered, and labeled.
And of course you need someone who knows what they're doing. Training these state-of-art models takes quite a bit of skill, especially since a lot of it is pretty much a black art.