Old Models launches: a playable archive of generative models from Efros-Leung to SDXL

jordiponsdotme · x · 2026-09-14

oldmodels.org, run by the Old Models Foundation, is now live — a playable archive of generative model history. The timeline spans Efros–Leung (1999), Image Quilting, VAE, DRAW, DeepDream, DCGAN, pix2pix, BigGAN, StyleGAN, VQGAN+CLIP, DALL·E Mini, Disco Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, ControlNet and SDXL. Each entry includes a description and link to the original project, with models runnable in a sandbox — some faithfully reconstructed in NumPy with author-published weights (e.g., Kingma's MNIST VAE, Eric Jang's DRAW). Community contributions of old models and optimized kernels are welcome.

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