Models & Products Updated 2026

Stable Diffusion

Definition

An open, latent-diffusion text-to-image model that made high-quality image generation runnable on consumer hardware.

Stable Diffusion is based on the latent diffusion model of Rombach et al. (2022), which runs the diffusion process in a compressed latent space rather than directly on pixels — cutting compute enough to generate high-resolution images on a single consumer GPU. Its open release spawned a vast ecosystem of tools and fine-tuned variants.

It is the canonical example of open-weight image generation, complementing closed systems like DALL·E.

References

Primary, peer-reviewed and archival sources for this definition.

High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
Rombach, R., Blattmann, A., Lorenz, D., Esser, P., & Ommer, B. (2022). Proceedings of CVPR 2022.

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

MultipleChat. "Stable Diffusion." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/stable-diffusion

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