I've been playing around Stable Diffusion, the most popular text-to-image AI model, for the past couple of week. Given the right text input, it can produce some truly amazing image outputs. For example, "ocean as seen from above" produces the title image for this post. If you want to try it yourself, you can try DreamStudio, which allows you to run the basic models online in your browser.

Here are some hand picked results from my generations. They have been upscaled to 4k using ESRGAN_4x and Neural Love. Feel free to use them!

4k Ocean Background/Texture 1

4k Ocean Background/Texture 2

Welcome to the blog of Shawn Wilkinson. I post thoughts, idea, and projects on the largest emerging technologies (AI, space, and crypto).

What I Do

In 2015 I started a decentralized cloud storage company called Storj. You can think of it as a mixture of AirBNB and Dropbox, which allows anyone (even you!) to rent out the extra hard drive space on their computer. We then allow users, developers, and businesses to store their data on a fast and secure cloud at a fraction of the cost of the typical providers.

The company has raised $33.5M over its lifetime, with over 39+ billion file pieces stored and spread over 13,000 active nodes. I've held the titles CEO/CTO during the early days of the company, and currently serve as Chief Strategy Officer doing R&D development.

Education

I graduated Morehouse College with a BS in Computer Science in 2014. I've conducted research at University of Washington and Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

Previous Work

Some of the stuff I've worked on in the past.

Bitcoin/Crypto

Got involved with Bitcoin in 2012 and it changed my life. Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money. It is one of the first highly successful examples of an incentive driven decentralized network. I started out mining 0.5 Bitcoin a day in my dorm room at Morehouse college. Unfortunately, it was making my room too hot, and I turned it off, but I fell in love with the technology. I made small contributions to Bitcoin Core, got involved with some the earliest crypto projects such as Peercoin, Primecoin, and BitShares.

Blender

In my early years I built a tutorial series teaching people how to use the 3D animation and graphics program Blender. The series has about 3.7 million views to date. I no longer do this, but it was great fun and I learned a ton about building communities and teaching.

• Blender 2.5 Tutorials
• Blender 2.4 Tutorials

More to Come!

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