After more than half a year of exploration, a group of technology giants that released large-scale AI models with high profile at the beginning of the year have reached the threshold of "profitable commercialization of AI technology" in the blink of an eye. Adobe, which is related to artificial intelligence, data validation, and SaaS concepts, issued five announcements in a row on Wednesday. The core of them is to talk about one thing:The company’s “Firefly” generative artificial intelligence, released nearly half a year ago, has ended internal testing and is officially open to users around the world. Driven by the news, Adobe's stock price rose nearly 2% after the market opened on Wednesday.
(Source: Adobe)
As the world's leader in creative productivity software, Adobe released "Firefly" AI in March this year. In addition to being able to generate images from text like a series of AI competing products, Adobe's AI can alsoGenerate artistic fonts, identify and replace target objects (such as changing clothes for a model), and the traditional technique of "P-picture" is not a problem. Compared with other major companies that use crawlers to find images to train models, Adobe's accumulation in the copyright field has also become a unique advantage for commercialization. (Adobe joins the AIGC battle: launching image generation AI copyright advantage to become a big killer)
Like Microsoft, Adobe also promisesIf a commercial user gets into a lawsuit due to the use of "Firefly" AI, the company will bear all compensation.
What’s more important for today is that Adobe revealed the charging plan for the AIGC function for the first time.The company will use a "generative points" approach to build a payment system. To put it simply, every time the user clicks the "Generate" button in the software, one point will be deducted. Adobe has also tweaked the Firefly program so that it will not automatically start generating images until the user has made all desired adjustments.
(Source: Adobe Example)
Since Adobe already has a relatively complex paid subscription system, for the vast majority of paying users,AIGC points will also be issued on a monthly basis based on existing subscription plans. For example, free users can receive 25 points a month, while the highest-tier Creative Cloud enterprise AllApps can receive 3,000 points. For users who subscribe to multiple plans, the AIGC points earned can also be accumulated, butAll points will be reset at the end of the month, and unused points will not be rolled over to the next month.
Adobe also stated that for the vast majority of users,Running out of credits doesn't mean you can no longer use Firefly to generate images, but it will run "significantly slower." For users who need additional points, the company also plans to launch a subscription service of 100 points/USD 4.99/month. The entire AIGC points system will be put into operation after November 1 this year.
Alexandru Costin, Vice President of Generative AI at Adobe explained,All of these models are very large, they run on the cloud and are expensive to operate. At the same time the company is optimizing output quality rather than output speed. Companies therefore need to protect user groups, ensure they have access to the service and ensure fair use of the service.
Interestingly, Costin also revealed that the company had considered adopting a token-based system, but early testers reported that such a system would be very difficult to explain to users.
AIGC pricing has also begun to "roll up"
Since the AIGC service itself is a new product, how much the service can be sold for depends entirely on the company's ideas. But as more similar products hit the shelves, pricing becomes comparable.
Adobe’s pricing for purchasing AIGC points separately is US$4.99/100 points, which is equivalent to5 cents to generate a picture. horizontal comparison,OpenAI’s Dall-E costs nearly 13 cents to generate a graph.
As far as cheapness is concerned, 1,000 points from the open source AI developer StabilityAI only cost 10 US dollars, which translates into only 1 cent per picture. Of course, in terms of richness of functions, there are visible differences between StabilityAI and "Adobe Creative AI Family Bucket".