@CWSmith yeah, that's the bad thing about the FOSS models, you need pretty good hardware to run them decently enough to be worth it😬🤷♂️there are good projects like #AIHorde that you can use. It runs on community hardware. Best way to do that is https://tinybots.net/artbot/create
Sad to announce that the AI Horde donations have effectively reached simple parity with infrastructure costs. I.e. The crowdfunded funds are not providing anything for further development.
This is continuing the trend since last summer. Unclear how a #FOSS project can attract support. We have hundreds if not thousands daily users, but practically nothing in support.
Back in July I first discovered NLNet and decided to apply for their NGI Zero Core grant to help me help me continue developing the AI Horde. Today I’m excited to announce that the AI Horde has officially been greenlit as one of the projects which will receive the August 2023 grant!
AI Horde has been a passion project from the start but it’s difficult to maintain the level of intensity I had for such a length of time. With my patreon funding significantly dwindling month-to-month, multiple of our backend developers dropping, and the need for me to also keep up with some of my real life duties as well as my other FOSS projects, development of the AI Horde has sadly slowed in recent months. While It rmains extraordinarily stable, it has had little to announce, and some new features are slower to “cook” and reliant in the work of valuable backend volunteers like Tazlin.
I am hoping that the addition of NLnet funding should help reintroduce some of that momentum as the release of the grant is contingent on specific milestones being reached.
I have plans for 5 roughly grouped areas of development, for which I have thought of various tasks to receive “bounties” for in the scope of this grant: AI Horde, Dreamer, Scribe, Alchemist and Godot Engine
The AI Horde tasks will focus on improving the middleware itself. Such as extending the shared key functionalities, improving the API documentation etc.
The Dreamer, Scribes and Alchemists tasks will focus on adding new functionalities to the the official workers, such as more generation workflows, batch processing etc.
Finally the Godot Engine tasks will improve the existing toolset of the AI Horde to support game development, such as improving my AI Horde Client, migrating it and Lucid Creations it to Godot Engine 4, etc.
The good news is that due to the way NLNet works, I had to submit stuff to work on, but I couldn’t work on them before the AI Horde was officially accepted (or rather, I could, but I couldn’t receive a “bounty” for them). Now that this is locked-in, I can start working on some of these with the added incentive of getting a reward at the end which can alleviate some of my ADHD executive disfunction. So if all goes well, you should start seeing more activity from me soon.
As always, if you want to support the AI Horde and my work in FOSS and the open commons, please do consider funding me at:
The AI Horde patreon support has massively dropped in the past few months sadly, so we're getting close to simply breaking even with the infrastructure costs and no support for development. If you appreciate what the AI Horde stands for, please consider supporting the main developer on patreon (https://www.patreon.com/db0), github (https://github.com/db0), or liberapay (https://liberapay.com/db0/)
Yesterday i discovered "AI Horde" @aihorde, a crowdsourced distributed cluster of Image generation workers. You can try AI generation for free, no strings attached and even contribute yourself with your resources!
This great project is created by @db0 and is run entirely on community hardware (you can contribute your hardware if you have the ability and some technology knowledge).
It's a fine balance. For a #fediverse service like #firefish, or a custom one like the #aihorde this needs so many skills, it's very difficult for one to know all of them. You need: