Comment by vineyardmike

From what I’ve heard, the issue is more that it’s harder to efficiently share the hardware across diffusion requests, so it’s more expensive to serve.

It sounds like there might be opportunities for local models (not open weight, but actually locally run) to use diffusion for faster responses on weaker hardware that doesn’t need to be shared.

But yea, it’s still a red-ish flag that big labs haven’t invested much in it. I could see Google/Apple getting value of this sort of local model, but maybe there’s enough research behind traditional models that it’s not worth the distraction at this point in time.