The field of image generation moves quickly. Though the diffusion models used by popular tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion may seem like the best we’ve got, the next thing is always coming — and OpenAI might have hit on it with “consistency models,” which can already do simple tasks an order of magnitude faster than the likes of DALL-E.
The paper was put online as a preprint last month, and was not accompanied by the understated fanfare OpenAI reserves for its major releases. That’s no surprise: this is definitely just a research paper, and it’s very technical. But the results of this early and experimental technique are interesting enough to note.
Consistency models aren’t particularly easy to explain, but make more sense in contrast to diffusion models.
In diffusion, a model learns how to gradually subtract noise from a starting image made entirely of noise, moving it closer step by step to the target ...
