Tag: ai horde

State of the AI Horde – 26/03/2023

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Things are progressing very rapidly in this dawn of the AI and likewise for the AI Horde. I thought it would be a good idea to post about all the things that changed and improved in recent days for our service.

More Requests. More statistics.

I’ve deployed endpoints to measure the usage of the AI horde. Now that one month has passed, we can take a look.

  • Per day, we are averaging 356,378 images (3.7 terapixelsteps) and 45,248 texts (4 megatokens)
  • In the past month, we produced 11,475,183 images, generating a staggering 127.6 terapixelsteps. Text has also picked up significant speed since merging the hordes with 1,241,895 generated texts for a total of 112.8 megatokens!

Top 10 Stable Diffusion models

The AI Horde offers close to 200 models at the same time. Our statistics allows us to see how the popularity of the various models changes day to day and month to month. The below are just the top 10 models being used.

  • Deliberate 22.2% (2550591)
  • stable_diffusion 15.1% (1730426)
  • Anything Diffusion 11.0% (1257688)
  • Hentai Diffusion 4.1% (468473)
  • Realistic Vision 3.0% (338742)
  • Counterfeit 2.7% (310337)
  • URPM 2.6% (297853)
  • Project Unreal Engine 5 2.5% (289006)
  • waifu_diffusion 1.8% (211572)
  • Abyss OrangeMix 1.8% (205268)

For the longest time SD 1.5 (stable_diffusion above) was king, but in the past month, Deliberate has confidently taken the lead and has been leading the pack with a staggering 20% of all image requests passing through the AI Horde! This speaks very highly for the popularity of the model

Top 10 Text models

Almost as many text models exist for the AI Horde, but they’re more varied. However last months saw the release of two big milestones, the Pygmalion models for chat-like generation, which happened after the gimping of the Character AI models. The new Llama model was also released, bringing unparalleled miniaturization of the model size, allowing consumer GPUs far more coherence.

  1. PygmalionAI/pygmalion-6b 52.4% (651566)
  2. KoboldAI/OPT-13B-Erebus 14.0% (174393)
  3. KoboldAI/OPT-6.7B-Erebus 6.7% (83249)
  4. KoboldAI/OPT-6.7B-Nerybus-Mix 3.8% (46747)
  5. KoboldAI/OPT-13B-Nerybus-Mix 2.8% (35110)
  6. KoboldAI/OPT-13B-Nerys-v2 2.7% (33667)
  7. Facebook/LLaMA-13b 1.9% (23367)
  8. KoboldAI/OPT-6B-nerys-v2 1.9% (23232)
  9. OPT-6.7B-Nerybus-Mix 1.6% (19268)
  10. KoboldAI/OPT-2.7B-Erebus 1.0% (12464)

We can see Pygmalion has immediately dominated text generation, with Mr.Seeker’s storytelling models mopping up the rest, but the Llama Ascendancy is just beggining!

Ratings, botting and counter-measures

A few months ago we started collecting ratings for the LAION non-profit to help improve the models existing in the commons, as the success of midjourney has a lot to do with them training their models with the best images their previous generation created.

The initial design was very simple to allow integrators to onboard it fast and giving good kudos rewards for those helping us. Unfortunately people almost immediately started abusing this by creating bots to rate randomly, therefore poisoning our collection’s accuracy.

I always knew this was a possibility but I was hoping I wouldn’t be forced to add countermeasures quite so soon. So I spent quite a few days adding a captcha mechanism (along other things) to block at least the low hanging fruit.

It immediately led to a drop in ratings per day which automatically shows just how much damage botted ratings were doing

New Features

We are fortunate enough to have gathered some great collators for the inference aspect of the AI Horde. So I wanted a big shout-out.

  • ResidentChief has stepped up strongly to help add new features and squash bugs in the nataili library. As a result the AI Horde now supports inpainting on many more models, a lot more post-processors, such as more upscalers and background removers, controlnet improvements, and so many other stuff too numerous to mention. They’re a beast!
  • Jug has been working on improving the AI Horde worker practically non-stop. Giving us a great terminal control, and improving the webui. Plus a lot of bugfixes and improvements in the bridge part of things
  • Tazlin who’s been doing a great deal of tech support in the channels as well as helping me detect and figure out malicious ratings. And also sending some code improvements as well!
  • Aes Sedai who’s been putting a ton of work on improving the moderation capabilities of the AI Horde with a custom frontend.

And of course all the frontend integrators like rockbandit, aqualxx, sgt.chaos and concedo, who’ve been keeping the frontends up to date, with a lot of features smartly using the capabilities of the AI Horde in ways even I had not expected!

CI/CD and pypi

I finally got around to adding CI/CD pipelines for AI Horde Worker and nataili. Now they will be automatically versioned when the right tag is applied to a PR. The Nataili package has also been republished to pypi and will also automatically receive new versions whenever we publish a new release on GitHub.

The notifications also automatically publish a notification on discord, so people can be aware when something new is up.

Alchemists

Using the new post-processing improvements from ResidentChief, I’ve expanded the interrogation worker so that it can now perform post-processing on images, as well as img2text operations. Unfortunately the previous name didn’t fit so well, so now I’ve renamed it to “Alchemist”, to signify it’s capability to convert images to something else.

Likewise, the official names for image worker is now “Dreamer” and text worker is now “Scribe”. Why not 🙂

Final Word

The pace of progress in this space is mind-blowing. I can’t wait to see what we achieve together in the coming days!

Merging of the Hordes. The AI Horde is live!

Db0

A while back (gosh, It occurs to me this project is half a year old by now!) I took significant steps to join the two forks I had made of the AI Horde (one for Stable Diffusion and one for Kobold AI) as they diverging code was too difficult to maintain and keep up to parity with features and bug fixes I kept adding.

Then later on, I realized that my code just could not scale anymore, so I undertook a massive refactoring of the code-base to switch to an ORM approach. Due to the time criticality of that refactor (at the time, the stable horde was practically unusable due to the sheer load), I focused on getting the stable horde API up and running and disregarded KoboldAI API, as that was running stable on a different machine and didn’t have nearly as much traffic to be affected.

Once that was deployed a number of other fires had to be constantly be put out and new features on-boarded as Stable Diffusion is growing by leaps and bounds. That meant I never really had a time to onboard the KoboldAI to the ORM as well, especially since the code required refactor to allow two types of workers to exist.

Later on, I added Image Interrogation capabilities as well, which incidentally required that I set up the horde to handle multiple types of workers. This lead me to figuring out how to do ORM class inheritance (which required me figuring out polymorphic tables and other fun stuff) but it also meant that a big part of the groundwork was laid to allow me to add the text workers (which is the kind of thing that does wonder to get my ADHD brain to get over its executive dysfunction).

Since then, it’s been constantly on the back of my mind that I need to finally do the last part and merge the two hordes into a single code base. I had kept the KAI horde into a single lonely branch called KAI_DO_NOT_DELETE (because I deleted the other branch once during branch cleanup :D) and the single-core horde node running. But requests for improvements and bug fixes on the KAI horde kept coming, and the code base was so diverged by now, that it was quite a mess to even remember how to update thing properly.

The final straw is when I noticed the traffic to the KAI Horde had also increased significantly, probably due to the ease of using it through KoboldAI Lite. It was getting closer and closer to the point where the old code base would collapse under its own weight.

So it was time. I blocked my weekend off and started the 4th large refactoring of the AI horde base. The one which would allow me to use the two horde types which were mutually exclusive in the past, at the same time.

This one meant a whole new endpoint, new table polymorphism and going through all my database functions to ensure that all the data is fetched from all types of polymorphic classes.

I also wanted to make my endpoints flexible as well, so it occurred to me it would be better to to have say api/v2/workers?type=text instead of maintaining api/v2/workers/image and api/v2/workers/text independently. This in turn run into caching issues, as my cache did not recognize the query part to store independently (and I am still not sure how to do it), so I had to turn to the redis cache.

That in turn caused by bandwidth to my redis cache to skyrocket, so now I needed to implement a local redis cache on each node server as well, which required rework for my code to handle two caches at the same time. It was a cascading effect of refactoring 😀

Fortunately I managed to get it all to work, and also updated the code for the KoboldAI Client and its bridge to use the new and improved version2 of the API and just yesterday, those changes were merged.

That in turn brought me to the next question. Now that the hordes were running together, it was not anymore accurate to call it “stable horde”, or “koboldai horde”. I had already foreseen this a while ago and I had renamed my main repo to the AI Horde. But I now found the need to also serve all sorts of generative AI content from the main server. So I made the decision to deploy a new domain name. And the AI Horde was born!

I haven’t flipped all the switches needed yet, so at the moment the old https://stablehorde.net is still working, but the eventual plan is to make it simple redirect to https://aihorde.net instead.

The KAI community is happy and I’m not anymore afraid they’re going to crash and burn from a random DB corruption and they can scale along with the rest of the Horde.

Now onward to more features!

The 150Mbit/s problem

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Recently my provider send me a nastygram about my Database VPS using too much bandwidth, 150Mbit/s or more, over 10 days, and how they have already throttled it to 100Mbit/s to avoid affecting other customers.

This caught me by surprise as I know that my Database is the central location where all my nodes converge to pull data, but the transfer between them should be just text. 150 Mbit/s would be insane quantities of text.

Fortunately my provider has also crashed my DB just a day before on the weekend, and their lack of response outside working hours forced me to urgently deploy a new VM with a new postgres DB until they recovered and I had switched all my nodes to use that already. Nevertheless, on checking the new DB, I discovered that it too was using the same incredible amount of bandwidth constantly. This meant that my new DB VM was also on a timer as Contabo throttles you, if your VM takes too much bandwidth for 10 days in a row. I had to resolve this fast.

First order of business was to swap the code so that all source images and source masks used for img2img are also stored in my cloudflare r2 CDN. The img2img requests are about 1/6 of the total stable horde traffic, but until now they were stored as base64 strings inside the database, which means that whenever those requests were retrieved, say for a worker to pick one, they transferred all that data back and forth.

This made a small dent in the traffic, but not nearly enough. I was still at 150Mbit/s outside rush hours and 200Mbit/s during peak demand.

I started getting a bit desperate as I expected that was a big part of this. At this point I decided to open a discord thread to ask my community for help in debugging this as I was getting out of my depth. The best suggestion came from someone who told me to enable pg_stat_statements.

That, along with the query to retrieve the most used queries, lead me to find a few areas where I could do some improvements through caching. One was the worker retrieving the models from the DB all the time for example, which I instead made it cache on redis.

Unfortunately none of my tweak seemed to do much difference in the bandwidth. I was starting to lose my mind. Fortunately someone mentioned the amount of rows retrieved so I decided to sort my postgres statements by amount of rows retrieved and that finally got me the thing I was looking for. There was one statement which retrieved a number of rows two whole orders of magnitude more than every other statement!

That statement was an innocent looking query to retrieve all the performance statistics for all workers, which I then created an average for. Given hundreds of workers and 20 rows per worker, and this statement being retrieved once per second per status check on a request, you can imagine the amount of traffic it generated!

My initial stop was to cache it on redis as well. That just shifted the problem because while there wasn’t a load on the DB, the amount of traffic stayed the same, just on a different VM. So the next step was to try and cache it locally. I initially turned to python cachetools and their TTL function caching. That seemed to work but it was a big mistake. The cachetools are absolutely not thread safe and my code relies on python waitress WSGI server, and that one spawns dozens of threads all over the place.

So one day later, I get reports of random 500 errors and other problems. I look in to find my logs spewing hundreds of logs about missing key errors on the cache. Whoops!

I did make an attempt to see how I can make cachetools thread safe, but that involved adding python locks which would delay everything too much, on ultimately something that is not needed. So instead I just created my own simple cache using global vars and built-in types which are thread-safe by default. That solved the crashing issue.

But then I remembered that I’m stupid and instead of pulling thousands of rows of integers so I can make an average using python, I can just ask PostgreSQL to calculate the average and simply return that final number to me. Duh! This is what happens when my head is not yet tuned into using Databases correctly.

So finally, I wiped my internal cache and switched to that approach. And fortunately that was it! My Mbit/s on my database server dropped from 150 average, to 15! a 10x reduction!

New Discord Bot for the Stable Horde

Db0

For a few months now the Stable Horde has had its own Discord bot, developed by JamDon. One of the most important aspects I wanted for the bot (and the reason for its original creation), was the ability to be able to gift kudos to people via emojis, which would serve as a way to promote good behavior and mutual aid.

In the process, the the bot received more and more features, such as receiving the functionality of being able to generate images from the Stable Horde, or getting information about the linked horde account etc.

Unfortunately development eventually slowed and then 2 months ago or so, ago JamDon informed me that they do not have time anymore to continue development. Further complicating things was the fact that the bot was written in JavaScript which I do not speak, which made it impossible for me to continue its development on my own. So it languished unmaintained, as the horde got more and more features and other things started changing. It was the reason why I couldn’t make the “r2” payload parameter true by default for example.

The final straw was when our own bot got IP banned by the horde because it was a public bot and had been added to a lot of servers, which we do not control. And apparently people there attempted to generate unethical images, which the horde promptly blocked. Unfortunately that meant that the bot image generation also stopped working everywhere every time this happened.

At the same time, another discord regular had not only developed their own discord bot based on the stable horde, but a whole JavaScript SDK! The bot was in fact very well developed and had most of the features of the previous stable horde bot plus a lot of new stuff like image ratings. The only thing really missing which was really important, was the ability to gift images via emojis, which was the original reason to get as discord bot in the first place 🙂

Fortunately with some convincing and plenty of kudos, zelda_fan agreed to onboard this functionality, as a few other small things that I wished for (like automated roles), and the Stable Horde Bot was reborn!

Unfortunately this did mean that all existing users were logged out and had to log in once more to be able to use the functionality, and it’s commands did change quite significantly, but those were fairly minor things.

Soon after the new bot was deployed, it was also added to the official LAION discord as well, so that their community could use it to rate images as well. I also checked and the bot has been already added to 365 different servers by now. Fortunately its demand is not quite as massive as it’s not prepared to scale quite as well as the stable horde itself.

BTW If you want to add the bot to your own discord server, you can do so by visiting this link. If you want to be able to transfer kudos, you’ll need to contact me so I onboard your emojis though. But other functionality should work.

Stable Horde receives stability.ai processing power!

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A week ago I mentioned that we had begun a collaboration with LAION to provide them with ratings on images. The amount of ratings we have received since then has blown away all our expectations! In just a week, you’ve all rated close to 130.000 individual images! As a comparison, the LAION-aesthetics v2, which was instrumental for training Stable Diffusion v1.x, used less than 600K rated images. We’ve reached 1/4 of that amount in a week!

Needless to say, these amounts seemed to turn some heads to the power of mutual aid provided by the stable horde, and some gears were set in motion.

LAION spoke with stability.ai directly and arranged that it would likewise benefit them to support the health of the stable horde itself. Since stability.ai is set to be the most direct beneficiaries of a better trained the laion-aesthetics v3 it makes perfect sense.

I was not privy to the discussions that happened, but I was happy to learn that Tom, the CTO of stability.ai arranged to provide us with some sponsored resources in the form of 4 VMs with RTX4000s Nvidia GPUs!

Quite surprisingly I had to deploy the VMs myself, so I crafted the most optimal setup for taking advantage of those 8Gb of VRAM through my experience with my own RTX2070. Each of them has been loaded with standard stable_diffusion 1.5 and 2.1 and each of them then has 8-10 other finetuned models to help cover the versatility provided by the Stable Horde. Granted, we are serving close to 100 different models currently, but the fact that those workers will remain running consistently 24/7, should help provide cover and allow other workers to switch to less supported models as well.

I hope this is the start of a fruitful collaboration between the stability.ai and the Stable Horde. The way I see it, the current scenario is a win-win for everyone. We get a more consistent service which allows more people to use it and makes them more likely to rate images to give back, which are then fed back to LAION and by extension stability.ai.

The Stable Horde has its first chrome extension!

Db0

About a week ago I deployed image interrogation to the stable horde, allowing low-powered GPUs and high-powered CPUs to also be able to become productive contributors on the horde and generate kudos for their owners.

A few days ago, the extension I talked about was finally released once more, relying on the Stable Horde this time: GenAlt

GenAlt is an extension that allows visually impaired people to generate alt-text for any image they encounter on the internet, giving them freer access to an area they were previously excluded. The extension’s description goes more into length about its stated purpose so I urge you to share it so that people who need it can find it

The first release of the extension was setup to automatically pick up every image displayed in the webpage and send them over to the horde for captioning it. That mean that simple scroll through twitter would lead to hundreds of images being sent to the horde for captioning per person!

That in turn led to the stable horde ending with 2000-4000 images to interrogate in its queue. Even with my own worker handling 20 threads at a time, it was just impossible to clear them all, which effectively meant the interrogation service became unusable. To top it off, as the stable horde started deleting expired interrogations, the extension received 404 responses, but unfortunately didn’t take that as a sign to abort polling for them.

At one point we had almost maxed out our available connections to each stable horde backend. But fortunately we kept chugging without much impact. It was one hell of a stress test though!

So I asked the developer to switch it to be triggered with a button or an image-hover action, which while not as user friendly, certainly wouldn’t completely flood the horde. That change (along with fixing the 404s) was finally deployed yesterday and that took care of the flooding issue.

An example of the GenAlt new trigger context menu

Now finally the horde is easily handling the captions as they trickle in at a controllable amount. The developer is planning some more updates, such as triggering it on mouse-hover instead of a specific context menu button, which is not as easy to access, and possibly we can onboard translating the captions before we send them back.

A collaboration begins between Stable Horde and LAION!

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last week I wrote how we started creating a new dataset of stable horde images to provide to LAION. Today I am proud to announce that we have further deepened our collaboration by setting up a mechanism which will allow the Stable Horde community to contribute dataset aesthetic ratings for LAION datasets!

Me along with hlky from Sygil.dev have used the last weekend to deploy a new service which allows us to aesthetically rate images from LAION’s multiple datasets. We deployed an API and thus allowed any client to interact with it. You can read the details of how it works on the blog I linked above, so I’m not going to repeat everything.

This is exciting for me because the Stable Horde has suffered from a distinct lack of visibility. None of the major AI-focused media (newsletters, YouTubers etc) have mentioned us to date. The very first coverage we got was from a PC magazine!

All that is to say that it’s been an uphill struggle to get the Stable Horde noticed in a way that will lead to more workers which will allow us to democratize access to AI for everyone. So I am very happy to pivot the amazing stable horde community in such a positive work which will bring more attention to what we’re trying to achieve.

We are still hard at work tweaking the information we store for each rating. For example we store the amount of images they had generated at the time of the rating, which will allow researches to filter out potentially spammy users.

We are also adding more and more countermeasures, as there’s always the fear that someone will just script random ratings to get kudos. Even though the Stable Horde is free to use without kudos and even though kudos has no value, people do strange things to see “numba go up”. Now I don’t particularly care if people harvest kudos like this, but I very well do care about our ratings being poisoned by garbage.

So if you’re someone who wants to make an exploit script to harvest kudos via ratings, please just join our discord instead. The kudos flow like candy when you’re active! And you will also not be harming the AI community itself.

Already our exported dataset has grown to 80K shared images. We have 20K ratings on the LAION datasets within 2 days. For comparison some of the biggest rated datasets have just 175K ratings which were done by paid workers (and we all know how motivated they are to be accurate). Our kudos incentives and community passion to improve AI is surprising even my wildest expectations to be honest!

Here’s to making the best damn dataset that exists!

Sharing is Caring

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For a while now I’ve been discussing with LAION on a way to use the power of the horde to help them in some fashion. After coordination with hlky from the Sygil.dev crew, I decided to provide an opt-in mechanism for people to store their text2img stable diffusion generations in an alternative storage bucket. This bucket in turn will be provided to LAION so that they can use it for aesthetic training, or for other similar purposes.

So today I finally released this new mode. For clients it’s a simple flag during the payload. Set “share” to True, and your request will be uploaded to the specific storage bucket. This will also save me infrastructure costs as I will not have to pay for the storage out of my own pocket for these.

To give a further incentive for people to turn this on, and because I wanted a way to show the cost of running the horde, I have also implemented a “horde tax” kudos burn. Every time you generate an image, the overall kudos cost is then increased by 3. This signifies the overall resource cost of passing through the horde, such as bandwidth, i/o and storage. However, if you opt to turn on the sharing switch, the overall “tax” is just +1 kudos.

You might ask, why not make the cost proportional to the overall kudos cost. Something like +30%/+10%. The reason is that the overall kudos cost is dependent on how difficult it is for the workers to generate that image. From the perspective of the horde, a 512x512x50 image is not much different from a 1024x1024x300 image, even though the latter would take an order of magnitude more time to generate.

In fact, many small requests are technically worse for the horde infrastructure costs, than a few small ones. It’s not that I want to discourage the small ones though, because they are actually good for the horde workers (and thus the overall generation speed). Therefore the “tax” is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things. Just a bit of extra “burn”.

One important thing to note however, is that anonymous accounts image generations are always shared. This is part of my general strategy where I want to discourage anonymous use of the horde. It just more difficult to manage the load when people are using it like that. This is why anonymous has the lowest priority and the most restrictions. And now they will always help provide data to LAION as well.

Finally, img2img and inpainting requests are never shared. This is because those are based on existing images and I cannot know if someone used some personal photo at low strength or something. So I prefer to err on the side of caution.

This is not the last support the AI Horde plans to give to LAION either. We are already working on new features like an aesthetic rating trainer and so on. I hope this sort of assistance can be put to good use for the benefit of all humanity!

The AI Horde Worker has a control UI

Db0

Another great update has landed now that the AI Horde Worker is in its own repository, a Web UI built with Gradio! All kudos to ResidentChief who has been doing amazing work for the horde lately!

The new WebUI is completely optional and it can run alongside either the Stable Horde worker or the interrogation Worker, allowing you to tweak their settings on the fly through a very simple interface. This should make it significantly easier for people to adjust their settings.

It still needs some work (I would like some information popups for each feature), but this should work for now. Soon we’ll add things like worker control (maintenance on/off etc) as well as user information and stats.

To run the new worker, simply call bridge-webui.cmd/sh

This should also nicely allow someone to update their bridge setting while sitting on their couch and AFK. Maybe we can add to it things like bridge control, allowing it to start/stop the worker through it. Many exciting possibilities!