As the pressure ratchets up for AI companies to go beyond the wow factor and make money, Stability AI has formalized three subscription tiers as it seeks to expand commercial use of its open-source, multimodal core models. The Stability AI Membership offerings include a free tier for personal and research (i.e., non-commercial) use, a professional tier that costs $20 a month, and a custom-priced enterprise tier for large outfits. The company says that with the three tiers it is “striking a balance between fostering competitiveness and maintaining openness in AI technologies.”

The announcement generated a lot of discussion on Reddit and elsewhere about whether for-fee programs can be considered open source, as well as what constitutes commercial use. Stability founder and CEO Emad Mostaque told VentureBeat that his company’s “code and weights will continue to be available for all tiers of our membership including commercial and non-commercial usage.”

Speaking to The Verge, Mostaque “compared this announcement to Meta’s release of Llama 2, which is billed as open source because it’s available on different platforms for free but also doesn’t meet all the requirements of the Open Source Initiative’s open-source definition.”

Those who want to leverage Stability AI’s core media and language models — with modalities for image, video and language — can find the member tiers detailed in the company’s news announcement.

Stability is on a path to fashion itself the “OpenAI of Europe,” as some put it, writes VentureBeat. The company has been actively introducing new models designed for creating 3D images, video, code, text, audio and more.

Mostaque predicts 2024 will be “the year of generative media,” much as 2023 marked emphasis on language models, and explains in VentureBeat that Stability has more media models on tap.

In February, Stability announced it had purchased Clipdrop, a browser-based suite of AI-powered tools that has been called the “Swiss Army knife” for visuals, combining image generation and editing. In addition to providing a basic menu of functions, the company uses it as a sandbox to showcase experimental and new model capabilities.