Bigger isn’t always better, especially when it comes to running generative AI models on commodity hardware. That’s a lesson that Stability AI is taking to heart, with its release today of Stable Diffusion 3 medium. Stable Diffusion is Stability AI’s flagship model providing text to image generation capabilities. The initial Stable Diffusion 3 release was previewed back on Feb 22, with public availability via an API on April 17. The new Stable Diffusion Medium is intended to be a smaller, yet very capable model that can run on consumer grade GPUs. The new medium sized model will make Stable Diffusion 3 an even more attractive option for users and organizations with resource constraints that want to run a highly capable image generation technology. Stable Diffusion Medium available today for users to try out via API, as well as on the Stable Artisan service via Discord. The model weights will also be available for non-commercial use on Hugging Face. With the new release, the initial debut release of Stable Diffusion is now known as Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3) Large. Christian Laforte, co-CEO at Stability AI told VentureBeat that the SD3 Large has 8 billion parameters. In contrast, SD3 Medium has only 2 billion parameters. “Unlike SD3 Large, SD3 Medium is smaller and will run efficiently on consumer hardware,” Laforte said. While many generative AI workloads, including Stable Diffusion have long relied on beefy Nvidia GPUs, the new Stability AI model changes the paradigm. The minimum requirement to run Stable Diffusion Medium is only a paltry 5GB of GPU VRAM. At that level, the model will run on a wide variety of consumer PCs as well as high-end laptops. To be fair the minimum requirement is still just the minimum. Stability AI recommends 16GB of GPU VRAM, which might be a stretch for most laptops, but still isn’t an unreasonable amount.

Full report : Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, intended to be a smaller yet capable model on consumer GPUs, with 2B parameters, compared to SD3 Large’s 8B.