Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion XL, its next-gen image synthesis model

Stability AI [has] released Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL), its next-generation open weights AI image synthesis model. It can generate novel images from text descriptions and produces more detail and higher-resolution imagery than previous versions of Stable Diffusion.

Notably, SDXL also uses two different text encoders that make sense of the written prompt, helping to pinpoint associated imagery encoded in the model weights. Users can provide a different prompt to each encoder, resulting in novel, high-quality concept combinations. On Twitter, Xander Steenbrugge showed an example of a combined elephant and an octopus using this technique.

And then there are improvements in image detail and size. While Stable Diffusion 1.5 was trained on 512×512 pixel images (making that the optimal image generation size but lacking detail for small features), Stable Diffusion 2.x increased that to 768×768. Now, Stability AI recommends generating 1024×1024 pixel images with Stable Diffusion XL, resulting in greater detail than an image of similar size generated by SD 1.5.