Now that Udio, as we know it, is gonna die next year, I was wondering if there is another way for Udio to survive beyond being UMG’s new shiny toy. Leaking the model may happen, but in the end, it would be a shitshow, and whoever does it can end up in jail.
Another option is as someone posted before, leave the current models open-source for everyone to use. This could work if Udio were a Chinese company, because they don’t give a crap about copyright and use everything they want to train their models, but they are a USA-based company, and I am sure UMG has made sure they can’t do that.
So, there is hope? I know this is just wishful thinking, but there is what I call the Flux route. Let me explain to you a little bit about the story of Stable Diffusion, one of the first and most famo…
Now that Udio, as we know it, is gonna die next year, I was wondering if there is another way for Udio to survive beyond being UMG’s new shiny toy. Leaking the model may happen, but in the end, it would be a shitshow, and whoever does it can end up in jail.
Another option is as someone posted before, leave the current models open-source for everyone to use. This could work if Udio were a Chinese company, because they don’t give a crap about copyright and use everything they want to train their models, but they are a USA-based company, and I am sure UMG has made sure they can’t do that.
So, there is hope? I know this is just wishful thinking, but there is what I call the Flux route. Let me explain to you a little bit about the story of Stable Diffusion, one of the first and most famous AI-image generators.
Stability AI started releasing open-source models, which were loved and cherished by the community, and thanks to them, a new AI Internet culture was born. But, power corrupts, and everything went downhill after they announced Stable Diffusion 3 with draconian restrictions, not only did the model stop being open-source, but it was a disaster, they nerfed the model by not including artistic styles and celebrities to the point it was a joke, something that could happen to the next Udio model if they only use UMG aproved music.
So what is the Flux route? Well, it seems not everyone was happy with what happened with Stable Diffusion 3, and they left the company, and Black Forest Labs was born. A rival company rising from the ashes of ex-Stability AI members, that released Flux, a model that was the best for a long time until (of course, the Chinese started spawning mysterious, amazing models out of nowhere). Black Forest Labs are not saviors or gods; they still have a non-open-source model, but they have Flux-Schnell, a smaller version free to train and use, and that it is still better than SD 3 will ever be.
Maybe we will be lucky, and not everyone at Udio is happy, and they will leave the company and start a mysteriously similar AI music-generator model, or well, we can always wait for the Chinese to take over another industry, they are already wreaking havoc with images with Qwen and videos with Wan.