Adobe Commercial "Firefly" AI: 60% Cheaper Than OpenAI

Adobe Commercial “Firefly” AI: 60% Cheaper Than OpenAI

Adobe Announces Commercial Launch of “Firefly” AI: Priced 60% Cheaper Than OpenAI.

After several months of exploration, the tech giants that boldly unveiled their AI mega-models earlier this year are now approaching the threshold of “commercializing and profiting from AI technology.”

On Sep 13, Adobe, which is associated with concepts like artificial intelligence, data sovereignty, and SaaS, made five significant announcements.

The core message revolves around the official launch of “Firefly,” their generative artificial intelligence, which had been in beta testing for nearly half a year.

Adobe’s stock price rose by nearly 2% following this news.

(Source: Adobe)

As a global leader in creative productivity software, Adobe introduced “Firefly” AI in March of this year.

In addition to generating images from text, similar to several AI competitors, Adobe’s AI can create artistic fonts, identify and replace target objects (e.g., changing a model’s clothing), and even excel in the traditional art of “photo editing.”

Unlike other big players who trained models by scraping images, Adobe’s accumulation of copyright expertise has become a unique advantage in commercialization.

Similar to Microsoft, Adobe has committed to covering all compensation in the event that commercial users face legal issues due to the use of “Firefly” AI.

What’s more crucial today is that Adobe has revealed the pricing plan for AIGC features for the first time. The company will establish a payment system based on “generative points.”

Simply put, every time a user clicks the “generate” button in the software, one point will be deducted.

Adobe has also adjusted the “Firefly” program so that it won’t automatically start generating images until the user has completed all desired adjustments.

(Source: Adobe Example)

Since Adobe already has a relatively complex subscription payment system in place, most paying users will receive AIGC points on a monthly basis according to their existing subscription plans.

For example, free users will receive 25 points per month, while the highest-tier Creative Cloud enterprise-level All Apps subscription will provide 3000 points.

Users with multiple subscriptions can accumulate AIGC points, but all points will reset at the end of each month, with unused points not rolling over to the next month.

Adobe also stated that for most users, running out of points does not mean they can’t use “Firefly” to generate images anymore, but the speed of execution will “significantly slow down.”

For users with additional point requirements, the company plans to introduce a subscription service priced at 100 points for $4.99 per month. The entire AIGC point system will be operational starting November 1st of this year.

Alexandru Costin, Vice President of Generative AI at Adobe, explained that all of these models are very large, they run in the cloud, and operating costs are high. The company is currently optimizing output quality rather than output speed. Therefore, Adobe needs to protect its user base to ensure they can access and use the service fairly.

Interestingly, Costin also revealed that the company had considered using a token-based system, but early testers found it challenging to explain to users.

Pricing for AIGC is also gaining momentum. Since AIGC services are relatively new, the pricing is entirely at the company’s discretion. However, as more similar products enter the market, pricing is becoming more comparable.

Adobe’s pricing for purchasing AIGC points separately is $4.99 for 100 points, which is equivalent to 5 cents per generated image. In comparison, OpenAI’s DALL-E costs nearly 13 cents per image.

Regarding affordability, Stability AI, an open-source AI developer, offers 1000 points for just $10, equivalent to 1 cent per image.

Of course, in terms of functionality richness, there is a visible difference between Stability AI and the “Adobe Creative AI Suite.”

Image from Adobe