Generate images in one second on your Mac using a latent consistency model

Latent consistency models (LCMs) are an advancement of Stable Diffusion designed to accelerate image generation, capable of producing images in just 4 to 8 steps compared to the traditional 25 to 50 steps, enabling the creation of 512x512 images at a rate of one per second on M1 or M2 Macs. The first distilled LCM from the Dreamshaper fine-tune, which incorporates classifier-free guidance, has been released by Simian Luo and colleagues, with more models anticipated in the future. Users can run these models locally on their Macs or in the cloud via Replicate, allowing for image generation and further experimentation. The guide provides detailed instructions for setting up the environment, including prerequisites like macOS 12.3 or higher and Python 3.10, and outlines steps for cloning the repository, setting up a virtual environment, and running the model. Users can engage with the community on GitHub or Discord for support and share performance benchmarks, while also having the opportunity to host custom models on Replicate.