The Ecosystem

Stable Diffusion's open release in 2022 did something no closed model could: it let an entire research and hobbyist community iterate on the architecture in public. The result is an ecosystem of base models, adaptation techniques and tooling that remains the reference implementation for applied diffusion work, and the place most new conditioning and fine-tuning methods appear first.

This article is the practitioner's view of that ecosystem — which base models exist, how they are adapted, how they are conditioned, and how they are run. For how diffusion works underneath, see [Diffusion Models](/course/deep-learning/neural-networks/diffusion-models) and [Stable Diffusion Architecture](/course/deep-learning/neural-networks/diffusion-models/stable-diffusion-architecture). For the browser-based creative workflow rather than the local one, see [AI for Artists](/course/ai-for-artists).