Stable Diffusion produces substantially higher quality images in most context, but is much more expensive to produce. The genius of VQGAN-CLIP is that it showed that you could take two pre-existing models and combine them to get text-to-image synthesis to work at all. By contrast, models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion require extremely expensive pretraining.
There's a discussion of this in the VQGAN-CLIP paper, see in particular 6.1 "Efficiency as a Value" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08583
Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of the VQGAN-CLIP paper and was tangentially involved with Stable Diffusion.
Comments
Stable Diffusion produces substantially higher quality images in most context, but is much more expensive to produce. The genius of VQGAN-CLIP is that it showed that you could take two pre-existing models and combine them to get text-to-image synthesis to work at all. By contrast, models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion require extremely expensive pretraining.
There's a discussion of this in the VQGAN-CLIP paper, see in particular 6.1 "Efficiency as a Value" https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08583
Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of the VQGAN-CLIP paper and was tangentially involved with Stable Diffusion.