---
id: "2022-08-22-stable-diffusion"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-08-22-stable-diffusion/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2022-08-22"
date_precision: day
category: open-source
importance: 5
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 3
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-08-22-stable-diffusion/

# Stable Diffusion released as open weights

Stability AI and collaborators released Stable Diffusion, a latent diffusion text-to-image model small enough to run on consumer GPUs, with openly downloadable weights — democratizing image generation.

## Key facts
- Public release 22 August 2022
- Based on 'High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models' (arXiv 2112.10752)
- Trained on subsets of the LAION-5B dataset
- Ran on consumer GPUs with under 10GB VRAM
- Spawned a huge ecosystem (fine-tunes, ControlNet, LoRAs)

## What happened

Anyone could download and run a state-of-the-art image generator locally, with a permissive license.

## Why it matters

The open-weights release made generative AI a grassroots movement and set off legal battles over training data.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Stable Diffusion Public Release (Stability AI)](https://stability.ai/news/stable-diffusion-public-release) (stability.ai, official)
2. [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10752) (arxiv.org, paper)
3. [CompVis/stable-diffusion (code)](https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion) (github.com, code)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2022-04-06: [DALL·E 2 brings photorealistic text-to-image generation](https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-04-06-dall-e-2/index.md)
- 2014-06-10: [Ian Goodfellow introduces Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)](https://postcutoff.com/e/2014-06-10-generative-adversarial-networks/index.md)