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

Db02 Comments

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.

The image ratings are flooding in!

Db0

It’s been about 2 weeks since we deployed the ratings system to gather data for LAION and once the main UIs on-boarded them, they’ve been coming in at an extraordinary pace!

So I thought I’d share some numbers.

Amount of ratings per client

 count  |     client
--------+-----------------
 175060 | ArtBot
    461 | Discord Bot
    159 | Droom
   4124 | Lucid Creations
   2545 | Stable UI
   9430 | UnknownCode language: SQL (Structured Query Language) (sql)

As you can see, the Artbot ratings are crushing everything else, but to also be fair, Artbot was the first to integrate into the ratings system and is also a very popular UI. The Lucid Creations has added post-generation ratings, but not yet generic ratings. Stable UI and Discord Bot only added ratings a couple days ago. Things are about to pick up even more!

Artifacts per client

 count |     client
-------+-----------------
 15308 | ArtBot
     0 | Discord Bot
     0 | Droom
  1073 | Lucid Creations
  2550 | Stable UI
     2 | Unknown
(6 rows)

And we also can see how many artifact ratings each client has done. Artifacts were added only a couple days ago as well. Still ArtBot dominates, but only by a single order of magnitude instead of two 😀

Rated images count

 count | ratings_count
-------+---------------
 71197 |             1
  7860 |             2
 30140 |             3
  3644 |             4
    71 |             5
    11 |             6
     2 |             7
(7 rows)

 count
--------
 112928
(1 row)

The amount of images which have received at least 1 ratings is very heartwarming. We have 112K images rated with at least 1 rating, of which 30K have 3 rating each!

Total ratings count

 count
--------
 191914
(1 row)

This is just the raw amount of ratings submitted. Almost 200K between generic ratings and post-generation ratings in ~14 days. That is ~13K ratings per day! For free! Just because people want to support something good for the commons!

This is the power of building a community around mutual aid! People love telling others what they think of their work (just see how many ratings midjourney has received) and people also love supporting an endeavour which through FOSS and transparency, ensures they are not being taken advantage to enrich a few at the top!

This is exactly what my dream was for this project. To unite a community around helping each other, instead of benefiting a corporation at the top. And it is working better than I ever expected in this short amount of time!

Y’all are awesome!

Stable Horde receives stability.ai processing power!

Db0

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.

The purpose of copylefts

Db0

Cory Doctorow knocks it out of the park with another great analysis of what the recent WotC decision means for the .

This perfectly showcases what a lot of people are missing about the strengths of the licenses like GPL and Creative Commons: These licenses are not meant to protect the creator (like copyrights) they are meant to protect the user!

When I share something I made and I provide it to your as AGPL, what I am effectively saying is that I want you to use this, and not only promise not to ever take it away from you, but also explicitly legally bind myself to that extend as well!

The point is that people change and things change, but just because I changed my mind later or got greedy, shouldn’t allow me to retroactively take away ideas I’ve given away. In fact things like AGPL shouldn’t even need to exist, and all ideas should work likewise.

But as always capitalism has ruined everything to the point where we need to make exceptions to avoid the expropriation of even things like human ideas.

This is why proponents constantly harp not to trust corporate licenses like these. They are not meant to protect you, they are meant to trick you.

A collaboration begins between Stable Horde and LAION!

Db01 Comment

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!