For image generation, this has already happened. To what degree, I can't tell, as I don't do image generation much so I don't have numbers on Midjourney subscriptions or any other image-AI-as-a-service sites. But civitai.com has become a place where people share their models, based off of Stable Diffusion or other similar bases, with various fine-tunings to achieve desired results. You name it, you can find a model for it at Civitai, and people doing some very creative things with them. (And also a lot of the obvious things, but it's the Internet, what did you expect?)

I haven't seen a text-based model sharing site spring up yet (perhaps they already have and I don't know about it yet). Civitai, being focused on image-generation, has the obvious advantage that it's easy to show off impressive results from the model on the front page of the website, and judging what someone's home-grown fine-tuned LLM will produce is a lot harder. But at some point I expect a Civitai equivalent site for text models, especially code-based ones, to become popular. That will seriously undercut Anthropic, OpenAI, et al, and will probably force them to find a price equilibrium.

Because once you're competing with "I spend $2,500 up front on a powerful video card, download an open-source model for free, and then I get pretty much everything I need for free" (additional power cost of running that video card isn't nothing, but probably not noticeable in your power bill compared to what you're already using)... then suddenly $200/month means your customers are thinking "after one year I would have been better off with the homegrown solution". The only way they'll continue to pay $200/month is if Claude/GPT/Gemini/whoever is truly head-and-shoulders above the "pay upfront once for hardware then use it for free afterwards" models available. And that's going to be doable, perhaps, but tough.

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janalsncm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I haven't seen a text-based model sharing site spring up yet (perhaps they already have and I don't know about it yet)

Huggingface.

The reason HF doesn’t also compete for image gen is probably some combination of momentum from Civit AI and HF not wanting to deal with the moderation headache.

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peab 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Civit ai is like 99% porn though. Most production usage of image gen is google or open ai as they are by far the best

	▲	rmunn 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As I said, a lot of the obvious things. And if you're scrolling through the front page without being logged in (i.e., so the default "no mature content" filter is on), there's some really creative stuff being done. I personally like the looks of the RPGv5 (or is the guy up to v6 by now? I forget) model, and plan to use it eventually to create custom portraits of characters in my tabletop roleplay campaigns. (Not running any right now, due to having basically zero free time at the moment, but eventually my current situation will change and I'll have the occasional weekend open again). But for a site sharing code-generation models, it's a very different scenario. I'm curious to see what will happen in that space.
	▲	janalsncm 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Google and OpenAI are good for one-offs but if you want a consistent style you need to use a LoRA.