Both SD1.4 and SDXL was in limited preview for a few months before a public release. This has been their normal course of business for about 2 years now (since founding). They just do this to improve the weights via a beta test with less judgemental users before official release.

How is a closed beta anything out of the ordinary? They know they would only get tons of shit flinged at them if they publicly released something beta-quality, even if clearly labeled as such. SD users can be a VERY entitled bunch.

I've noticed a strange attitude of entitlement that seems to scale with how open a company is - Mistral and Stable Diffusion are on very sensitive ground with the open source community despite being the most open.

If you try to court a community then it will expect more of you. Same as if you were to claim to be an environmentalist company then you would receive more scrutiny from environmentalists confirming your claims.

That's… not really relevant to Stability AI at all. SAI isn't "claiming" anything. They are show, not tell (well, mostly). They give a technology away for free the likes of which everybody else keeps very tightly locked behind SaaS. Then people bitch about said free technology.

I wonder why they didn’t call their company SharewareAI.

Moreover, people would start training on the beta model, splitting the ecosystem if it doesn't die entirely. There's nothing good in that timeline.

Happened already with the SDXL 0.9 weights leak. People started training off of that and it quickly became wasted effort.

Uff, that's a good point.

That's nothing new with Stability. Even 1.5 was "released early" by RunwayML because they felt Stability was taking too long to release the weights instead of just providing them in DreamStudio.

Stability will release them in the coming weeks.

Because first impressions matter. See the current perception of Gemini and its "woke parameters".