message by circlestone_labs, OP, posted 14 hours ago):
Even if I don't completely retrain on a new model, a proper dataset update and general upgrade to Anima would still be a huge finetune on many millions of images. This is probably at minimum $20k. A retrain on a newer, larger base model would be $100k+. I make okay money right now from the licensing thing, but not enough to immediately spend that much on a big training run when rented GPUs are more expensive than ever. Turbo and reinforcement learning R&D is basically free (I can do it on my local machine), so that is what I'm spending time on until I have the funds for a large base model pretrain.
NAI v5 recently came out, and that model was well over 1 million $ of rented compute just on the training run itself. These things are expensive if you want to make something actually good.
Uh oh! No Anima update, repeat: NO ANIMA UPDATE!!!