AMD’s new AI image generator for Windows creates images directly on your PC – forget the cloud
Thanks to a partnership between AMD and New Zealand AI startup TensorStack, a new AI image generator has hit the market. It lets you generate images locally on your computer, like the little space squirrel you see above.
Amuse, the name of the new image generator for Windows, is currently available in beta and offers a more private, localized method of generating images. You can generate AI images offline, which is big news since most AI image generators on the market currently require internet access due to their cloud-based technology. The local approach is aimed at reducing the risk of your information being shared and reducing potential avenues for cyberattacks. Even better, Amuse doesn’t require a subscription fee either – it’s free to use right now.
Reporting on the new tool, ITBrief stated that “AMD is using Amuse to demonstrate the capabilities of its latest hardware, specifically the AMD Ryzen AI 300-series processors. At the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in March, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su demonstrated the use of stable diffusion models in Amuse to render images of text prompts, running on an AMD AI PC.”
The Amuse tool also seems to offer a user-friendly interface called ‘EZ Mode’ which should help beginners get into the AI generation game, and from what ITBrief states, we can expect some key features such as “MD XDNA Super Resolution solution, which speeds up output and doubles image size.” Additionally, we can expect options for converting paint to image and drawing to image, and the ability to create AI filters that you can use for future projects.
Offline and dead
With Nvidia now such an integral part of the AI world, it’s pretty interesting to see something like this pop up from AMD. Outside of the GPU market, where Nvidia still dominates, AMD’s biggest competitors in the CPU space are Intel and Qualcomm, with the latter also going all-in on AI. Perhaps this is AMD’s way of getting in on the act, carving out its own space in the AI sphere and offering users a free service that no competitor has jumped on yet. Nvidia does have its own generative AI imaging tools, Picasso and Canvas, but they’re not simple consumer-grade image generators like Amuse.
That Amuse is a local AI tool compared to cloud-based ones does fit with AMD’s normally cautious approach to generative AI (such as not using AI in FSR, the rival to Nvidia’s AI-powered DLSS game upscaling software), and could pay off in the long run. Who wouldn’t want an AI image generator they can fire up straight from their PC, knowing they’re not putting themselves or their data at risk? Most of the best AI image generators require not only an internet connection, but an account with either a paid subscription or a limited number of tokens, so Amuse has a good chance of knocking all of those out of the park.
If you are a Windows user and want to try it out, you can go to the Amuse official website and download the app. Keep in mind that the image generator is still in beta and therefore not exactly stable and things can go wrong. So make sure to backup your PC before messing around with it.
