Diffusion Models Live Event

Real-time diffusion inference dropped below 1 second per frame on consumer hardware. FLUX.1-schnell and SDXL Turbo both demonstrated live generation at multiple AI events this quarter.

This breaks the assumption that diffusion = batch-only workloads. Hosted APIs like Replicate charge ~$0.004 per image; self-hosted on an RTX 4090 drops that below $0.001 at scale. Most teams are still defaulting to API calls for tasks that now have viable self-hosted paths — that's just leaving margin on the table.

Teams building real-time video tools or game asset pipelines should benchmark self-hosted now. Under 5k images/day, API convenience still wins.