Year One of the AI Horde!

Can you believe that I published the first version of the AI Horde exactly 1 year ago? The first version published was called the KoboldAI Horde as it was built around KoboldAI Client specifically, and it had very little traction. But almost as soon as I built it, Stable Diffusion came out, I forked the project to handle SD, and my life was never the same again!

Since the start of its life the AI Horde has generated ~84M images and ~30M texts, free for everyone! We’ve been making and will continue making hundreds of thousands of images and text per day. We now have literally dozens of third party UI and bots integrated directly into the AI Horde.

A quick recap of all that’s happened this year

• Sept 2022 – KoboldAI Horde is launched. KoboldAI gets integrated Horde support. Stable Horde is later forked from KoboldAI horde and launched. Lucid Creations is published.
• Oct 2022 – We get our first raid. First countermeasures are developed. Artbot is published. Stable UI is published 1 hour later. Our first official discord bot is published. Img2Img is developed. Stable Horde fulfills 1 Million requests.
• Nov 2022 – Teams are added. Post-processing is developed, Mastodon bot is launched.
• Dec 2022 – Stable Horde reaches its limits and is massively refactored to scale better. Reddit bot is launched. KoboldAI lite is launched. Stable Horde is in the news for the first time
• Jan 2023 – Image interrogation is developed. First third party mobile app is launched. Worker UI is developed. We start collaborating with LAION to gather Aesthetic ratings. The first third party chrome extension is launched. We start collaborating with Stability.ai. We replace the discord bot with different codebase.
• Feb 2023 – Stable Horde and KoboldAI Horde are merged into the single unified AI Horde.
• Mar 2023 – AI CSAM filter is developed. First “State of the AI Horde” is published. Ratings receive bespoke countermeasures.
• Apr 2023 – AI Horde breaks away from the nataili inference developer due to toxicity.
• May 2023 – AI Horde switches from the nataili backend to using comfyUI as a backend. Shared keys are developed. Massive documentation update. Ratings are published onto Huggingface. LoRa support is added.
• Jun 2023 – AI Horde starts supporting all LoRas in CivitAI. hordelib receives a DMCA from the previous nataili developer
• Jul 2023 – hordelib is recovered from DCMA limbo. SDXL Beta is added on the AI Horde with collaboration from stability.ai. Haidra is announced and we become part of Nivenly
• Aug 2023 – Textual Inversion support is added. AI starts supporting all TIs on CivitAI

Writing this down, just makes me realize how much stuff has been happening constantly! Not a single month where nothing much happened. The most relaxed would be Dec-Jun where I spent basically 1 month in bed sick, but I still managed some big results!

The birthday celebration event is still ongoing at the time of publishing this in the AI Horde discord where I’m staying online in a voice chat and answer questions or just chat with people. We have plenty of threads for generating and sharing art etc.

I also asked the AI Horde community to tell me what the AI Horde means to them, and I wanted to quote some of them here:

The AI Horde’s (completely free and open) Image and Text generation services rely on volunteers donating their computing resources, and those volunteers do so without profit motive or selfish reasons. The result is huge number of people – tens of thousands, at least – have been able to get access to a technology that may be otherwise of their reach. I find this to be a hugely inspiring display of altruism and goodwill on the part of everyone involved, and I am deeply humbled and honored to be part of that ecosystem of people

Tazlin – AI Horde backend developer

AI Horde took KoboldAI from personal software to an online platform and allowed us to build a version people don’t have to install. Now its not just used for personal use, but also as a testing platform by model developers for their latest models before public releases.

Henky – KoboldAI Lead

Thanks to Stable Horde, I can generate new storyboard images for existing film concepts making the process of hashing out scenes and sequences for film projects easier. I’m thankful for everyone involved, the contributors and software developers for the tools, and to db0 for making all of this possible.

Mr.Happy

I think horde is a great way to make AI accessible to the general public without the need for complicated installs or expensive hardware. It’s certainly a great and low friction way to get people introduced to generative AI without the limitations and restrictions of closed off/ corporatized AI services like chatgpt… it’s been a vital backbone of the FOSS AI ecosystem over the past year.

Concedo – KoboldAI Lite developer

AI Horde is a powerful tool for breaking the monopoly of large corporations and providing AIGC with an independent platform to avoid the risk of being controlled by these corporations. This platform offers more affordable, free, and diverse AI services. Many AI drawing service providers now operate their own GPU cloud services and charge users high fees while controlling, castrating, and modifying AI drawing models, which severely infringes on user rights. The emergence of AI Horde allows AIGC to retain all potential while providing new ideas and solutions for expanding AI application scenarios, making it easier for ordinary people to access various AI technologies.

Pawkygame – AIpainter developer

For me, the whole community that’s been built around the Horde highlights some of the best about free and open source software. There are so many enthusiastic and knowledgeable people who are wiling to help each other out or discuss the latest in the world of generative AI. It’s been an awesome community to be a part of and one of my favorite little corners of the internet.

Rockbandit – Artbot developer

Stable Horde is an excellent tool for generating images, useful for creating reference material for traditional or digital art, creating art itself through the platform, or using it as a starting point to learn about AI. And the fact that it’s a free platform for image generation is a significant blow to companies that seek to monetize AI access.

It’s great for those who lack artistic skills like myself, and more skilled artists can use it for inspiration, or take a hybrid approach by making something manually and using image to image generation.

The various distributed workers available means that the barrier for entry for joining the horde is a device with an Internet connection, and I firmly believe the collaborative nature of the Horde would make Tim Burners-Lee proud.

It’s an excellent first step towards a bright future, full of opportunity made possible by free and open access to advanced technology. Now we just have to hope that the rest of humankind doesn’t trip.

CrabMan314

The AI Horde is the best way to burn us worker GPU for other’s happiness

Namplop

Here’s to another year of AI Horde!