Wasn't that the same outcome of the blockchain hype? Crypto-bros ran of with the money and a few developers getting little or no funding plucked away on GitHub.
The main difference is that I see way fewer people defending the A.I. hype and people are generally much more critical and realistic about the application of LLMs.
These tools are actually great and useful though, right now. I wasn't as into crypto, but I mostly remember the tools being "neat right now, and very useful in the future."
Stable Diffusion in particular has a huge community using it clustered around CivitAI, its just flying under the radar.
> Stable Diffusion in particular has a huge community using it clustered around CivitAI
While CivitAI has some monetization and may itself be doing well between that and whatever capital it has available to burn befor eit needs to be self-supporting, I get the sense that most of the creators tuning models and sharing there are scrambling for support, so I'm not sure that's really a refutation.
And most of the finetuners/mergerers are indeed not making much money, but (IMO) they are closer to "power users" than open source code maintainers, and shouldn't necessarily be raking money in like they are a lynchpin.
The main difference is that I see way fewer people defending the A.I. hype and people are generally much more critical and realistic about the application of LLMs.