Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

https://stability.ai/news/stabilityai-announcement

by ed • 2 years ago

513 392 2 years ago

Huge news, and his reasoning doesn’t seem to make sense to me. Can anyone elaborate further?

minimaxir4• 2 years ago

There have been a series of high profile staff/researcher departures, implied to be partially as a result of Emad's leadership. The latest departures of the researchers who helped develop Stable Diffusion could be fatal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402

minimaxir4• 2 years ago

He's leaving to work on decentralized AI? That's exactly what Stability AI was doing before it became clear the economics no longer work out in practice, and starting a new company wouldn't change that. (Emad is an advisory board member to a decentralized GPU company, though: https://home.otoy.com/stabilityai/ )

Obviously this is the polite way to send him off given the latest news about his leadership, but this rationale doesn't track.

nextworddev2• 2 years ago

I’m guessing Emad sees the “rationale” in the recent revival of crypto prices - and the subsequent demand for altcoins

tarruda• 2 years ago

AI + Crypto bull market is a recipe for grabbing tons of VC money

ctrw• 2 years ago

Think seti at home.

Instead of wasting all the compute on bitcoin we pretrain fully open models which can run on people's hardware. A 120b ternary model is the most interesting thing in the world. No one can train one now because you need a billion dollar super computer.

__loam8• 2 years ago

I would expect most of the big tech firms have the capital to build a gpu cluster like that.

kleinsch• 2 years ago

People are estimating that Meta is buying $8-10B in GPUs this year alone.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/01/18/mark-zuckerberg-indicate...

ImprobableTruth2• 2 years ago

Transmission speeds aren't fast enough for this, unless you crank up the batch size ridiculously high.

mirekrusin8• 2 years ago

SETI made sense because there is a lot of data where you download chunk and do expensive computation and return thin result.

Model training is unlike that. It's large state that is constantly updated and updates require full, up to date state.

This means you cannot distribute it efficiently over slow network with many smaller workers.

That's why NVIDIA is providing scalable clusters with specialized connectivity so they have ultra low latency and massive throughput.

Even in those setups it takes ie. a month to train base model.

Converted to distributed setup this same task would take billions of years - ie. it's not feasible.

There aren't any known ways of contributing computation without access to the full state. This would require completely different architecture, not only "different than transformers" but "different than gradient descent", which would be basically creating new branch in machine learning and starting from zero.

Safe bet is on "ain't going to happen" - better to focus on current state of art and keep advancing it until it builds itself and anything else we can dream of to reach this "mission fucking accomplished".

monkeydust• 2 years ago

Reminded me of Petals offering distributed ML inference anyone tried this?

https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals

Der_Einzige4• 2 years ago

For the record, this already exists in the open source world for Stable Diffusion.

https://stablehorde.net/

You can host a local horde and do "Seti at home" for stable diffusion.

vishnugupta• 2 years ago

"Decentralised" AI probably means something to do with crypto. Like mint this ocin to get access to that model? That's my guess.

hsjsbeebue5• 2 years ago

Like “here is a rug” let me pull it for you!

kalkr• 2 years ago

decentralization != coinshit

jasonjmcghee• 2 years ago

A few years ago it was all about democratized AI

seydor3• 2 years ago

using old nvidia cards as space heaters

moneycantbuy• 2 years ago

what's the real reason?

dragonwriter3• 2 years ago

The most obvious potential real reason is Stability isn't making money, and the people that matter don't think Emad was going to be able to turn it around.

trickstra2• 2 years ago

Well, that means his replacement will be a money shark, enshittyfying Stability AI for higher profits.

cybernoodles• 2 years ago

Maybe related to last years controversy?

“Mostaque had embezzled funds from Stability AI to pay the rent for his family's lavish London apartment” and that Hodes learned that he “had a long history of cheating investors in prior ventures in which he was involved”

joegibbs2• 2 years ago

It also seems like the company just isn't doing very well, it looks like there have been constant problems since Stable Diffusion was released - not enough funding, people leaving, etc. Which I don't get - you create a massive new piece of software that is a huge leap forward and you can't just get more funding? There have to be big structural issues at Stability.

yreg5• 2 years ago

not enough funding

They have raised 110M in October.

zenlikethat3• 2 years ago

I’m practicality shaking my head in disbelief at all the red flags this guy has and people are still defending him. Stability and its work are great. We should support an open community and ethos. And Emad can still be a shady narcissist con man. These are all compatible views.

xyst• 2 years ago

The “wework” ceo of ai bubble

ed• 2 years ago

A lot more social good with this one though. Hard to cheer for Stability.ai’s failure.

anonylizard4• 2 years ago

Wework transferred investor money to office building owners and the CEO himself.

Stability transferred investor money to countless AI users in the world. Emad certainly didn't get a billion dollar payday.

echelon2• 2 years ago

Stability models are mostly open source. While it was never going to last, Stability put the entire industry in a race to the bottom, all the while building up the open ecosystem.

rvz3• 2 years ago

Looks like many AI startups are experiencing a bit of some turbulence and chaos in the recent months:

First the OpenAI rebellion in November, then the Inflection AI acqui-hire from Microsoft not willing to pay the over-valued $4B and deflected that to $600M instead (after making $0 revenue) and now a bit of in-stability at Stability AI with the CEO resigning after many employees leaving.

What does that say about the other AI companies out there who have raised tons of VC cash and aren't making any meaningful amount of revenue? I guess that is contributing to the collapse of this bubble with only a very few companies surviving.

__loam8• 2 years ago

Wait you're telling me you can't make the next trillion dollar industry by incinerating capital while making no money?

gunapologist99• 2 years ago

You have a point, but remember Amazon and Google did exactly that and figured out the business model later.

d-z-m• 2 years ago

OpenAI rebellion

This phrasing makes me feel like we're living in some techno-future where corporations are de-facto governance apparatuses, squashing rebellion and dissidents :^)

jprete• 2 years ago

Colonial companies did this all the time, e.g. the British East India Company, and the 1800s American railroads had the Pinkertons. There's also the phenomenon of the company town.

abvdasker• 2 years ago

The big companies fighting to win gen AI have forgotten how to build good products. There seems to be enormous confusion about AI applications — few seem to be willing to commit to a singular focus or application, instead trying to be everything to everyone. The tried and true way to build something big is to bootstrap a killer app that solves a real problem and then expand horizontally to other problem spaces. These companies are trying to do too much too soon (probably because they have too few financial constraints). A lack of focus.

stale20026• 2 years ago

Well RIP Stability AI.

I love their models and I love how they have changed the entire open source AI ecosystem for the better, but the writing was always on the wall for them given how unprofitable they are.

I don't think much of the AI startup scene or socials groups like e/acc would have existed if it weren't for the tech that they just gave away for free.

Its interesting how Stability AI and their VC funding have done a much better job of acting effectively as a non-profit charity (because they don't have profits. lol) to speed up AI development and open source their results as compared to other companies that were supposed to have been doing that from the beginning.

They really were the true ActuallyOpenAI.

Related to this, if you are an aspiring person who wants to improve the world, tricking a bunch of VC investors to fund your tech and then giving away the results to everyone free of charge is the single best way to do it.

ShamelessC4• 2 years ago

socials groups like e/acc

Good riddance.

stale20026• 2 years ago

Hey, let me know when the doomers have built anything that has mattered because they choose to, and not because they are forced to my market forces.

At least the open source AI people have code that you can use, freely without restriction.

The doomers, on the other hand, don't do anything but try and fail to prevent other people from releasing useful stuff.

But, in some sense I should be thanking the doomers because I rather that people with such incompetence were the enemy as opposed to people who might have a chance of succeeding.

rmbyrro2• 2 years ago

Are you aware of smth called criminal code? This is one of the worst advices I've ever seen. Tricking people to obtain money? How's this not fraud?

stale20026• 2 years ago

This is one of the worst advices I've ever seen.

Really? Because stability AI caused a very large amount of good in the world.

It arguably kicked off the entire AI startup industry.

Tricking people to obtain money? How's this not fraud?

Its not fraud because you don't have to lie to anyone. You can tell VCs exactly what you plan on doing. Which is to open source all of your code... and... uhhh... yeah that will totally make the company valuable.

There are lots of ways of making sales pitches about open source, or similar, that will absolutely pass regulatory scrutiny and are "honest", and yet still have no hope of commercial success and also provide a huge amount of value to the public. Like what stability AI did.

Der_Einzige4• 2 years ago

Huggingface are also the real actual openAI

abi• 2 years ago

How? What models have they put out that are relevant?

Satam4• 2 years ago

The underlying reason is that current AI businesses and models are failing to capture any significant economic value. We're going to get there, but it will take some more work. It won't be decades, but a few more years would be helpful

minimaxir4• 2 years ago

AI businesses/models are capturing economic value: the problem is that costs are increasing much faster than revenue.

dheera2• 2 years ago

No, Stability isn't getting 99.99% of the money people are making from Stable Diffusion. Their (lack of a) business model is the problem.

Satam4• 2 years ago

With the current limitations of AI in mind, it often looks like a solution looking for a problem. It's too unreliable, slow, dumb, and too expensive for a lot of the tasks companies would like to use it for.

And that becomes part of the problem because it's hard to sell unreliable technology unless you design the product in a way that plays well with the current shortcomings. We will get there, but it's still a few iterations away.

echelon2• 2 years ago

No. There can be tremendous value in AI, you just won't find it here.

The reason is that Stability.ai gave away everything for free. Until recently, they didn't even attempt to charge money for their models.

I've heard the only reason they're not already closed up is that they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota they leased out years ago. Companies are subletting from Stability, which locked in lots of long term GPU processing capacity.

There's no business plan here. This is the Movie Pass of AI.

__loam8• 2 years ago

It will be interesting to see when OpenAI gets as open about their costs as their revenue.

yreg5• 2 years ago

the only reason they're not already closed up is that they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota

They have raised 110M in October and they say that training a particular model costs them hundreds of thousands $ in compute costs.

They don't lack money.

huytersd4• 2 years ago

OpenAI and midjourney have millions of paying customers.

bamboozled4• 2 years ago

Tens of millions of freeloaders too.

Satam4• 2 years ago

So the problem might be two-fold. First, there's an oversupply of companies trying to use AI relative to the current technological capabilities. Second, even when value is created, the companies don't capture the value to profit out of it.

livrem• 2 years ago

Stability has dreamstudio.ai, but it never seemed like they were seriously investing in it to try to compete with Midjourney?

HarHarVeryFunny3• 2 years ago

Yeah, but not sure if OpenAI is profitable yet (they lost $500M last year), and costs are rising, and competition increasing.

GPT-4 cost $100M+ to train (Altman), but Dario Amodei has said next-gen models may cost $1B to train, and $10B models are not inconceivable.

I'd guess OpenAI's payroll is probably $0.5B (770 highly paid employees + benefits, not to mention hundreds of contractors creating data sets).

famouswaffles2• 2 years ago

Midjourney is the most popular discord channel by far with 19.5M+ members, $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees.

The problem has nothing to do with commercializing image gen AI and all to do with Emad/Stability having seemingly 0 sensible business plans.

Seriously this seemed to be the plan:

Step 1: Release SD for free

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit

The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even think the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious hurdle to wider commercial adoption.

In my opinion, a paid, easy to use, robust UI around Stability's models should have been the number one priority and they waited far too long to even begin.

There's been a lot of amazing augmentations to the stable diffusion models (ControlNet, Dreambooth etc) that have propped up, lots of free research and implementations because the research community has latched onto the stability models and I feel they failed to capitalize on any of it.

epivosism• 2 years ago

Yes, and MJ has no public API either. Same for Ideogram, I imagine they have at least 10m in the bank, and aren't even bothering making an API despite being SoTA for lots of areas.

Satam4• 2 years ago

There's money to be made for sure, and Stability's sloppy execution and strategy definitely didn't help them. But I think there are also industry-wide factors at play that make AI companies quite brittle for now.

andrewljohnson• 2 years ago

I wonder if MidJourney is still ripping. I’m actually curious if it’s superior to ChatGPT’s Dall-E images… I switched and cancelled my subscription when ChatGPT added images, but I think I was mostly focused on convenience.

teaearlgraycold6• 2 years ago

$200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees.

The dream

llm_trw3• 2 years ago

The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even think the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious hurdle to wider commercial adoption.

The more I think about the AI space the more I realize that open sourcing large models is pointless now.

Until you can reasonably buy a rig to run the model there is simply no point in doing this. It's no like you will be edified by setting the weights either.

I think an ethical business model for these business is to release whatever model can fit into a $10,000 machine and keeping the rest closed source until above machine is able to run them.

biztos• 2 years ago

Yes, and I'm grateful to them for sticking to that plan. :-)

But for the individuals involved, it might also be

Step 2: Leverage fame in AI space for massive VC injection on favorable terms.

blensor2• 2 years ago

Are we sure that Midjourney is still on that trajectory?

I was a heavy user since the beginning but my usage has dropped to almost 0

jonplackett• 2 years ago

Leonardo.ai have basically done exactly this and seem to be doing OK.

It’s a shame because they’re literally just using stable diffusion for all their tech but built a nicer front end and incorporated control net. No-where else has done this.

Controlnet / instantID etc are the really killer things about SD and make it way more powerful than Midjourney, but they aren’t even available via the stability API. They just don’t seem to care.

HlessClaudesman• 2 years ago

Heres a Stable Diffusion buisness idea: sign up all the celebrities and artists who are cool with AI, and provide end users / fans with an AI image generation interface, trained on their exclusive likenesses / artwork (loras).

You know, the old tried and true licensed merchandise model. Everybody gets paid.

JimDabell• 2 years ago

Seriously this seemed to be the plan:
Step 1: Release SD for free
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit

That’s not true. He was pretty open about the business plan. The plan was to have open foundational models and provide services to governments and corporations that wanted custom models trained on private data, tailored to their specific jurisdictions and problem domains.

throwaway2037• 2 years ago

First paragraph: These are wild stats. Thank you to share. How did they fund themselves, if no external funding?

Der_Einzige4• 2 years ago

What's insane to me is the fact that the best interfaces to utilize any of these models, from open source LLMs to open source diffusion models, are still random gradio webUIs made by the 4chan/discord anime profile picture crowd.

Automatic1111, ComfyUI, Oobabooga. There's more value within these 3 projects than within at least 1 billion dollars worth of money thrown around on yet another podunk VC backed firm with no product.

It appears that no one is even trying to seriously compete with them on the two primary things that they excel at - 1. Developer/prosumer focus and 2. extension ecosystem.

Also, if you're a VC/Angel reading my comments about this, I would very much love to talk to you.

johnnyanmac4• 2 years ago

It won't be decades, but a few more years would be helpful

I see it this way to be honest:

- companies will aggresively try to use AI in the next 2-3 years, downsizing themselves in the meantime

- the 3-5 year launch mark will show that downsizing was an awful idea and took too many hits to really be worth it. I don't know if those hits will be in profits (depends on the company) but it will clearly hit that uncanny valley.

- 6-8 year mark will have studios hiring like crazy to get the talent they bled back. They won't be as big as before, but it will grow to a more sane level of operation.

- 10-12 year mark will have the "Apple" of AI finally nail the happy medium between efficiency and profitability (hopefully without devastating the workers, but who knows?). Competitors will follow throw and properly usher the promises AI is making right now.

- 15 year mark is when AI has proper pipelining, training, college courses, legal lines, etc. established and becomes standard faire, no stranger than using an IDE.

As I see it, companies and AI tech alike are trying to pretend to be the 10 year mark all the while we're currently in legal talks and figuring out what and where to use AI to begin with. In my biased opinion, I hope there's enough red tape on generative art to make it not worth it for large studios to leverage it easily (e.g. generative art loses all copyright/trademarkability, even if using owned IPs. Likely not that extreme, but close).

DrSiemer• 2 years ago

Companies are aware of the current AI generation being a tool and not a full replacement (or they will be after the first experiments they perform).

They will not downsize, they will train their workforce or hire replacements that are willing to pick up these more powerful and efficient tools. In the hands of a skilled professional there will be no uncanny valley.

This will result in surplus funds, that can be invested in more talent, which in turn will keep feeding AI development. The only way is up.

Not allowing copyright on AI generated work is a ridiculous and untenable decision that will be overturned eventually.

dagelf• 2 years ago

Models are already general, and you can set them to recursively self improve narrowly and still need humans in the loop for general improvement... but those humans are only going to get less... so change your years into months instead and multiply by rand(2)... and change the hire-backs into more startups doing more things...?

HarHarVeryFunny3• 2 years ago

90% of startups fail, so it's not just a matter of waiting for the tech to get better and having more value - most of the current players will simply fail and go out of business.

ec109685• 2 years ago

Previous controversy involving the CEO (2023): https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-di...

“ In reality, Mostaque has a bachelor’s degree, not a master’s degree from Oxford. The hedge fund’s banner year was followed by one so poor that it shut down months later. The U.N. hasn’t worked with him for years. And while Stable Diffusion was the main reason for his own startup Stability AI’s ascent to prominence, its source code was written by a different group of researchers. “Stability, as far as I know, did not even know about this thing when we created it,” Björn Ommer, the professor who led the research, told Forbes. “They jumped on this wagon only later on.” “

“ “What he is good at is taking other people’s work and putting his name on it, or doing stuff that you can’t check if it’s true.”

coolspot• 2 years ago

He did provide thousands of GPUs for training all those open-source and open-weights models, no?

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

People forget, moving things around and funding them and making it all work is what makes an entrepreneur. Elon Musk did that and all great founders do that. Emad doesn't have to write the code himself.

zenlikethat3• 2 years ago

Maybe… he certainly was good at taking credit for it. Not course if they stepped in, rebranded something they didn’t make and threw a bunch of AwS GPUs they couldn’t actually afford at it though

https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/so-many-things-dont-add-up-...

anonylizard4• 2 years ago

Emad had the genius idea of essentially paying for the branding rights to an AI model. This was viewed as insane in the pre-ChatGPT era, and only paid off massively in retrospect.

Also all those 'controversies' were mostly the result of an aggrieved co-founder/investor who decided to sell their shares before SD1.4's success. Emad may not have proven to be competent enough to run an large AI lab in the long run, but those complaints are just trivial 'controversies'.

Eisenstein2• 2 years ago

This was viewed as insane in the pre-ChatGPT era, and only paid off massively in retrospect.

Paid off how?

spxneo2• 2 years ago

wow I did NOT know this

I wonder how many ppl among VC/PE circles are also sugar coating their experiences and successes

dpflan3• 2 years ago

It's the game to play. Asymmetric information with the goal to attain wealth, influence, power, ego-stroke, whatever opportunity is present.

_xivi2• 2 years ago

What he is good at is taking other people’s work and putting his name on it, or doing stuff that you can’t check if it’s true.

I have to say, this is a quite common ignorant statement that's said about almost every CEO.

I'm not sure if there's more to it in this particular case, but no, CEOs aren't stealing your work. Similarly, marketers aren't parasites. Designers aren't there to waste your time. Many engineers seem to hold similar belief that others are holding them down or taking advantage of their work. This is just a congnitive bias.

subtra3t• 2 years ago

Not surprised at all to see how unpopular this sentiment is on HN. For some reason HN seems to love one dimensional stereotypes for every job that isn't theirs.

Actually that's wrong, even the idea that engineers are smarter than managers is very prevalent here.

baobabKoodaa4• 2 years ago

Emad jumped on the train after the major inventions were invented and PoCs were made. He could not have contributed to them unless he had a time machine. (Yes he contributed to the training costs of SD1.4 but the time point when he made the decision was not early research.)

barrkel2• 2 years ago

FWIW, Rombach and Esser, the two guys behind the original model, gave some appreciation for Emad on Twitter just now.

jack_riminton2• 2 years ago

An Oxford MA is confusingly what you automatically a few years after leaving undergrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Arts_(Oxford,_Cambri...

So there's that

seydor3• 2 years ago

Thats a hit piece, but whatever, isn't that what the most prominent/funded academics do? As far as i know he is known generally as CEO of the company that makes SD, not as the creator of SD. It does look like without him these models wouldnt have evolved so much

ImprobableTruth2• 2 years ago

Really sad to see. Emad pivoting to posting crypto nonsense on twitter made me think the writing is on the wall for Stability, but I still didn't expect it so soon. I expect they'll pivot to closed models and then fade away.

rvz3• 2 years ago

Really sad to see. Emad pivoting to posting crypto nonsense on twitter made me think the writing is on the wall for Stability

Open-source AI is a race to zero that makes little money and Stability was facing lawsuits (especially with Getty) which are mounting into the millions and the company was already burning tens of millions.

Despite being the actual "Open AI", Stability cannot afford to sustain itself doing so.

yreg5• 2 years ago

Source on them burning tens of millions? What are they burning it on?

dragonwriter3• 2 years ago

I expect they'll pivot to closed models and then fade away.

They already pivoted away from open-licensed models.

ShamelessC4• 2 years ago

crypto nonsense on twitter

got any links?

tymscar• 2 years ago

Not twitter but here he is talking about that:

https://youtu.be/BdZo4JUBSQk

zenlikethat3• 2 years ago

Translation of “stepping down to focus on distributed AI”:

Getting fired and making moves to capitalize on the current crypto boom while it lasts

n2d4• 2 years ago

Getting fired by whom? He is both the majority shareholder and controls the board

skybrian• 2 years ago

I don’t know much about him. Was he into cryptocurrency before AI?

benreesman• 2 years ago

I mean, is AI a less sketchy space in 2024 than crypto/blockchain in 2024? Two or three years ago sure, I guess, but today?

The drama around OpenAI is well documented, there are multiple lawsuits and an SEC investigation at least in embryo, Karpathy bounced and Ilya's harder to spot than Kate Middleton (edit: please see below edit in regards to this tasteless quip). NVIDIA is pushing the Dutch East India Company by some measures of profitability with AMD's full cooperation: George Hotz doesn't knuckle under to the man easily and he's thrown in the towel on ever getting usable drivers on "gaming"-class gear. At least now I guess the Su-Huang Thanksgiving dinners will be less awkward.

Of the now over a dozen FAANG/AI "boomerangs" I know, all of them predate COVID hiring or whatever and all get crammed down on RSU grants they accumulated over years: whether or not phone calls got made it's pretty clearly on everyone's agenda to wash all the ESOP out, neutron bomb the Peninsula, and then hire everyone back with at dramatically lower TC all while blowing EPS out quarter after quarter.

Meanwhile the FOMC is openly talking about looser labor markets via open market operations (that's direct government interference in free labor markets to suppress wages for the pro-capitalism folks, think a little about what capitalism is supposed to mean if you are ok with this), and this against the backdrop of an election between two men having trouble campaigning effectively because one is fighting off dozens of lawsuits including multiple felony charges and the other is flying back and forth between Kiev and Tel Aviv trying to manage two wars he can't seem to manage: IIRC Biden is in Ukraine right now trying to keep Zelenskyy from drone-bombing any more refineries of Urals crude because `CL` or whatever is up like 5% in the last three weeks which is really bad in an election year looking to get nothing but uglier: is anyone really arguing that some meme on /r/crypto is what's pushing e.g. BTC and not a pretty shaky-looking Fed?

Meanwhile over in crypto land, over the same period of time that AI and other marquee Valley tech has been turning into a scandal-plagued orgy of ugly headlines on a nearly daily basis, the regulators have actually been getting serious about sending bad actors to jail or leaning on them with the prospect (SBF, CZ), major ETFs and futures serviced by reputable exchanges (e.g. CME) have entered mainstream portfolios, and a new generation of exchanges (`dy/dx`, Vertex, Apex, Orderly) backed by conventional finance investments in robust bridge infrastructure (LayerZero) are now doing standard Island/ARCA-style efficient matching and then using the blockchain for what it's for: printing a consolidated, Reg NMS/NBBO/SIP-style consolidated tape.

As a freelancer I don't really have a dog in this fight, I judge projects by feasibility, compensation, and minimum ick factor. From the vantage point of my flow the AI projects are sketchier looking on average and below market bids on average contrasted to the blockchain projects, a stark reversal from even six months ago.

Edit: I just saw the news about Kate Middleton, I was unaware of this when I wrote the above which is in extremely poor taste in light of that news. My thoughts and prayers are with her and her family.

ramraj072• 2 years ago

I and many many people around me use ChatGPT every single day in our lives. AI has a lot of hype but it’s backed by real crap that’s useful. Crypto on the other hand never really did anything practical except help people buy drugs and launder money. Or make people money in the name of investments.

sevagh• 2 years ago

CL: Lee Chae-rin (Korean rapper), Craigslist, Chlorine

NMS: Neuroleptic malignant syndrome, No Man's Sky

NBBO: National Best Bid and Offer

SIP: Session Initiation Protocol, Systematic Investment Plan, Security Infrastructure Program

xyzzy4747• 2 years ago

The writing was on the wall for Stability AI after they went on the massive anti-adult content tirade for their newer models.

SV_BubbleTime• 2 years ago

I don’t know if that is a factor. But the dog whistle is “safety”.

anonylizard4• 2 years ago

That 'anti-adult tirade' is a strategic choice.

1. Open source even more capable 'adult models' and get sued to oblivion (They still have massive lawsuits)

2. Neuter the model to uselessness and have users abandon it.

Both are bad choices, and require a very, very skilled CEO to thread the needle. Emad failed. that's all.

astrange3• 2 years ago

No, that's the sign they're being sensible, since the thing you want is illegal in most countries.

immibis3• 2 years ago

I looked this up and apparently the controversy is that Stable Diffusion was trained on child porn? How can the model itself not be considered objectionable material then? Does the law not apply some kind of transitive rule to this? And don't they want to arrest someone for having the child porn to train it on?

yreg5• 2 years ago

I love their product, but I was suspect of Emad ever since he said “There will be no programmers in five years.”[0]

That just sounds so simplistic that I don't believe he believes it himself.

[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stability-ai-ceo-no-human-193...

ramraj072• 2 years ago

The worst thing here is not that he doesn’t believe in it himself, but that he does. As George Costanza said, “it’s not a lie if you believe it”

yreg5• 2 years ago

No, my problem is that I don't believe he believes it. It is a lie.

tracerbulletx• 2 years ago

The CEO of nvidia said basically the same thing so I don't know if that's the best metric.

lolinder• 2 years ago

You mean the CEO of the company that just rode the AI hype wave to become one of the top 3 most valuable companies in the world? It's his fiduciary duty to say things like that, whether or not he believes them, the same as every other CEO in the AI space.

dheera2• 2 years ago

Unfortunately when Stability shuts down Wall Street might get spooked that the bubble is popping and downvote NVDA

bruce5112• 2 years ago

I think when parsing that statement it's important to understand his (and your) definition of "programmer".

We (I) tend to use the term "programmer" in a generic way, encompassing a bunch of tasks waaay beyond "just typing in new code". Whereas I suspect he used it in the narrowest possible definition (literally, code-typer).

My day job (which I call programming) consists of needs analysis, data-modelling, workflow and UI design, coding, documenting, presenting, iterating, debugging, extending, and cycling through this loop multiple times. All while collaborating with customers, managers, co-workers, check-writers and so on.

AI can do -some- of that. And it can do small bits of it really well. It will improve in some of the other bits.

Plus, a new job description will appear- "prompt engineer".

As an aside I prefer the term "software developer " for what I do, I think it's a better description than "programmer".

Maybe one day there'll be an AI that can do software development. Developers that don't need to eat, sleep, or take a piss. But not today.

(P.S. to companies looking to make money with AI - make them able to replace me in Zoom meetings. I'd pay for that...)

hsjsbeebue5• 2 years ago

There are almost no programmers today (you need to do malloc and low level sys calls in C to be considered a programmer).

teaearlgraycold6• 2 years ago

Well it's been almost a year since he said that. You would think we'd have lost the first chunk of programmers to AI by now.

callalex2• 2 years ago

We have, there are a bunch of bottom of the barrel executives that have done hiring freezes and layoffs under the assumption that AI would replace everything. It will go the exact same way as the outsourcing craze that swept the industry in the mid aughts. The executives that initiate the savings will be praised and rewarded lavishly, and then when everything blows up and falls apart those responsible for the short sighted and ineffective cuts will be long gone.

andrepd• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure Elon Musk also didn't believe in "FSD in 6 months" every time he said it, but it was just marketing.

Filligree• 2 years ago

I guess SD3 will never be released, then. What a pity. :-/

astrange3• 2 years ago

That's silly. For one thing, he says he's still the majority shareholder.

barrkel2• 2 years ago

That's my guess too. Emad teased SD3 while it looked like he was looking for more money, but without convincing rationale for not releasing it already. The samples may have been heavily cherry-picked, we don't know if it's actually a decent model in practice.

riwsky• 2 years ago

OpenAI? closed source. Stability AI? facing instability.

Startup idea: Unprofitable.ai

sidcool• 2 years ago

Accenture : $1.1 billion GenAI projects!

technics256• 2 years ago

Looks like he went to crypto

https://x.com/sreeramkannan/status/1771340250801127664?s=46

ilaksh• 2 years ago

Decentralized systems, peer to peer, Blockchain, smart contracts, are all important technologies with real use cases. It is not accurate to refer to any of them as simply "crypto" especially in this context.

ajkjk• 2 years ago

Are they now

dpflan3• 2 years ago

EigenLayer's tag line is? "Build open innovation ∞ play infinite sum games. Also: @eigen_da" (from their twitter profile).

Infinite sum games...

stedman• 2 years ago

LMAO

"infinite games" + "positive sum" => "infinite sum"

has big Sarah Palin energy: "refute" + "repudiate" => "refudiate"

https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2010/11/15/13133...

bicepjai• 2 years ago

Wow, the comments seems mean spirited. I would say Thanks for releasing open source models and accepting to pass the torch

raincole3• 2 years ago

I'm very grateful for SD. But I'm also quite sure SD3 and the future models won't be open.

PerryCox• 2 years ago

I interviewed at Stability AI a while ago and that interview was a complete shit show. They quite literally spent 40 minutes talking about Emad and his "vision". I think we actually talked about what they wanted me to do there for like 15 minutes.

I was not feeling confident about them as a company that I wanted to work for before that interview, afterwards I knew that was a company I wouldn't work for.

tonyoconnell• 2 years ago

His shares still have majority vote and full board control.

ml-anon• 2 years ago

Emad is such an obvious grifter it’s honestly mad that he attracted so much VC money.

He couldn’t even get his own story straight regarding his education and qualifications which should be a pretty clear disqualifying red flag from the outset.

The Forbes article from last year was dismissed on here as a hit piece but the steady flow of talent out was the clear sign, capped by the original SD authors leaving last week (probably after some vesting event or external funding coming through).

Simon321• 2 years ago

Exactly, i don't understand why people are not seeing this

hruzgar2• 2 years ago

haters always gonna hate no matter what someone does

feverzsj2• 2 years ago

"AI"s are still pretty much vaporwares like 40 years ago. When people get tired of these toys, the bubble will simply burst, and nothing valuable left.

oyster143• 2 years ago

I use chat-gpt almost every day and find it very usefull

renonce• 2 years ago

Competitors are catching up and one day the chat API providers will race the prices to bottom

feverzsj2• 2 years ago

And how you gonna verify chat-gpt's result? By googling?

mikelitoris• 2 years ago

So… instability.ai?

gdsdfe• 2 years ago

AI as a field feels like crypto from a few years back

patchinko• 2 years ago

At least, this has the same impact on GPU prices.

spaceman_2020• 2 years ago

He probably saw all the crypto AI grifters make hundreds of millions and wanted in on the action.

With his name attached, any crypto AI coin will launch straight to $500m mcap

frays• 2 years ago

I can't find much information about Shan Shan Wong, the new co-CEO. Not even a photo of this person on the internet.

Anyone else have information about them?

Razengan• 2 years ago

What's with these weirdly convoluted re-spellings of Arabic/Muslim names to make them look not Arabic/Muslim?

darkhorse13• 2 years ago

He's not an Arab, he's ethnically Bangladeshi, and that's a common way to spell his name here.

malthaus2• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emad_Mostaque

that wikipedia page screams "grifter", wow

polygamous_bat2• 2 years ago

Really no wonder he ended up in “decentralized AI” aka crypto grifting. It must be like returning home after a long day.

jacky2wong3• 2 years ago

I think Stability is in an interesting situation. A few suggestions on its direction and current state: 1. Stability AI's loss of talent at the foundational research layer is worrying. They've lost an incredibly expensive moat and there's enough unsolved problems in the foundation layer (faster models, more energy efficient models, etc.) to ensure Stability provides differentiated offerings. Step 1 should be rectifying the core issues of employment and refocusing this more into the AI lab space. I have no doubt this will require a re-steering of the ship and re-focusing of the "mission". 2. Stability AI's "mission" of building models for every modality everywhere has caused the company to lose focus. Resources are spread thin. With $100M in funding, there should be a pointed focus in certain areas - such as imaging or video. Midjourney has shown there is sufficient value capture already in just 1 modality. E.g. StableLM seems like early revenue rush and a bad bet with poor differentiation. 3. There is sufficient competition on the API layer. Stability's commitment to being open-source will continue to entice researchers and developers but there should be a re-focus on improvements in the applied layer. Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack for image generation or video generation would be a great focal point for Stability that separates itself from the competition. People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves their problems.

achow2• 2 years ago

Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack for image generation or video generation would be a great focal point for Stability that separates itself from the competition. People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves their problems.

Recently, during an interview [1], when questioned about OpenAI's Sora, Shantanu Narayen (Adobe CEO) gave an interesting perspective on where value is created. His view (paraphrased generously)..

GenAI entails 3 'layers': Data, Foundational Models and the Interface Layer.

Why Sora may not be a big threat is because Adobe operates not only at first two layers (Data and Foundational model) but also at the interface layer. Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker, but I guess most importantly they already have moviemakers as their customers.

So product companies like Adobe (& Microsoft, Google etc.) are in better position to monetize GenAI. Pure-play AI companies like OpenAI are perhaps in B2B business. Actually, they maybe really in api business, they would have great data, would be building great foundational models and giving results of those as APIs; which other companies who are closer to their unique set of customers with their unique needs would be able to monetize and some part of those $$ flows back to pure-play AI companies

[1] At 5 mins mark.. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/02/20/adobe-ceo-shantanu-nar...

Hendrikto2• 2 years ago

Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker

I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and their UI/UX and how they don’t understand their customers.

Never really used any of their products myself though. Maybe they still are best-in-class. I can’t tell.

Zetobal• 2 years ago

People don't want to buy a third of an inch drill, they want a third of an inch hole.

jacky2wong3• 2 years ago

Thanks for linking. I agree and strongly believe product companies are in the best position to monetize Gen AI. Existing distribution channels + companies being extremely fast to add AI features.

Where start-ups like Stability need to be rising to compete will have to be AI-native e.g. products re-thought of from the ground up like an AI image editor or as foundation-level AI research companies, agents or AI infrastructure companies.

There's no reason Stability can't play in both B2B and API if planned and strategized well and OpenAI can definitely pull it off with their tech and talent. But Stability has a few important differentiators from OpenAI where I believe if they launch an AI-native product in the multimodal space, they stand to differentiate significantly: - People join because they believed in Emad's vision of open source so it is their job to figure out a commercial model for open source. They can retain AI talent by ensuring a commitment to open source here. If they need to ensure their moat is retained and can commercialize, they should delay releasing model weights until a product surrounding the weights has been released first. Still open source and open weights but give them time to figure out a commercial strategy to capitalize their research. However because of this promise, they will not be able to license their technology to other companies. - Stability's strong research DNA (unsure about their engineering) is so badly fumbled by a lack of a cohesive product strategy that it leads to sub-par product releases. In agreement to the 3 'layers' argument, that's exactly Stability's greatest strength and weakness. Their focus on foundational models is incredibly strong and has come at the cost of the interface layer (and ultimately the data layer as it has a flywheel effect).

The company currently screams a need for effective leadership that can add on interface and data layers to their product strategy so they can build a strong moat outside of a strong research team which has shown it can disappear at any moment...

huytersd4• 2 years ago

They tried to ponder to the open source CEO’s but as much as open source is an ideal, it’s a pretty sure way to failure for the most part. The only way open source works is if a rich company open sources parts of their non revenue forming items.

jacky2wong3• 2 years ago

Yes - open source is a good go to market strategy. They should not open source if there's no good, strong business strategy around how they plan to commercialize. But there are many ways to commercialize an open source model. For many it's lead generation into a paid offering or a managed offering of the open source model.

dpflan3• 2 years ago

Recent genAI shakeups in the past week:

1. Inflection AI -- ceo out to MSFT

2. Stability AI -- ceo out to ____ (infinite sum games? with EigenLayer?)

What else? Is there a "GenAI is going great" website yet? (ala "web3 is going great": https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/)

JCM93• 2 years ago

2024 is going to shift into a tough year for AI. Business minded folks are already starting to deeply question where the value is relative to the amount of money spent on training. Many/most of the GenAI companies have interesting ideas but no real business plan. Many of the larger AI companies look very shaky in terms of their governance and long term stability. Stability is showing itself to be very unstable, OpenAI has its mess that still seems not fully resolved, Inflection had a bunch of strange stuff go down earlier this week, and more to come.

I’m a huge fan of the tech, but as reality sets in things are gonna get quite rough and there will need to be a painful culling of the AI space before sustainable and long term value materializes.

samstave• 2 years ago

Many/most of the GenAI companies have interesting ideas but no real business plan

This is most likely the reason being the SAMA firing, to be able to re-align to the MIC without terrible consequence, from a PR perspective.

no criticism here aside from the fact that we will see the AI killer fully autonomous robots will be here and unfettered by 'alignments' much sooner than we expected...

And the MIC is where all the unscrupulous monies without audits will come from.

MyFirstSass2• 2 years ago

no criticism here aside from the fact that we will see the AI killer fully autonomous robots will be here and unfettered by 'alignments' much sooner than we expected...

What exactly do you mean with this sentence? That less woke/regulated companies will suddenly leapfrog the giants now? What timeframe are we talking here?

And do you mean for example non public mil applications from US/China or whatever or private models from unknown players?

One thing i've been wondering is that if GPT-4 was 100 mil to train, then there's really a lot of plutocrats, despots, private companies and states for that matter that could in principle 10x that amount if they really wanted to go all in, and maybe they are right now?

The bottleneck is the talent pool out there though, but i'm sure there's a lot people out there from libertarians to nation states that don't care about alignment at all, which is potentially pretty crazy / exciting / worrying depending on view.

alephnerd6• 2 years ago

Business minded folks are already starting to deeply question where the value is relative to the amount of money spent on training

Kinda. In my experience, the bigger issue is the skillset has largely been diffused.

Overtraining on internal corpora has been more than enough to enable automation benefits, and the ecosystem around ML is very robust now - 10 years ago SDKs like Scikit-learn or PyTorch were much less robust than they are now. Implementing commercial grade SVM or <insert_model_here> is fairly straightforward now.

ML models have largely been commodified, and for most usecases, the process of implementing models fairly straightforward internally.

IMO, the real value will be on the infrastructural side of ML - how to simply and enhance deployment, how to manage API security, how to manage multiple concurrent deployments, how to maximize performance, etc.

And I have put my money where my mouth is for this thesis, as it is one that has been validated by every peer of mine as well.

JCM93• 2 years ago

I agree with you. My reference in business questioning value was on the flood of money going into building new models. That’s where we will see a significant and painful culling soon as it’s all becoming quite commoditized and there’s only so much room in the market when that happens. Tooling, security services and other things to build on top of a commoditized generative AI market opens up other doors for products to be built.

ASinclair• 2 years ago

Business minded folks are already starting to deeply question where the value is relative to the amount of money spent on training.

Not just training but inference too, right? They have to make money off each query.

keyringlight• 2 years ago

I'm fairly sure this is why there's a rush to get AI related capabilities into processors for consumer devices, to offload that computing so they don't bear the ongoing cost and it'll probably be more responsive to the user.

JCM93• 2 years ago

Yes. Each query needs to generate enough revenue to pay for the cost of running the query, a proportional cost of the cost to train the original model, overhead, SG&A, etc. just to break even. Few have shown a plan to do that or explained in a defensible way how they’re going to get there.

A challenge at the moment is a lot of the AI movement is led by folks that are brilliant technologists but have little to no experience running viable businesses or building a viable business plan. That was clearly part of why OpenAI has its turmoil in that some where trying to be tech purists where others knew the whole AI space will implode if it’s not a viable business. To some degree that seems to behind a lot of the recent chaos inside these larger AI companies.

hallqv• 2 years ago

lol Emad was always seemed like an obvious fraud to me. Not quite SBF level but same vibe. Whenever someone goes overboard on the nerd look it’s always a red flag.

WhereIsTheTruth• 2 years ago

Fishy, it was the outsider that obliterated the establishment and the current narrative

It was bound to happen anyways..

narrator• 2 years ago

You just got to bribe a few key AI researchers to completely control the future of humanity, lol.

sinuhe69• 2 years ago

6 months ago, I expressed my doubt about the viability of Stability business model on HN News. Mostaque answered the questions with a resounding yes and claimed the business of Stability.AI is better than ever.

Today he resigned.

Redster• 2 years ago

Would you please stop doubting? The consequences are just too great. /joke

sp332• 2 years ago

He still owns a ton of stock, and last month said they were on track to be cash flow positive this year.

hankchinaski• 2 years ago

Bubble starting to burst, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes

anon77252• 2 years ago

let us hope

jgalt212• 2 years ago

Given all the talk here, it seems like the state of the business and the state of the stock market are grossly out of whack. Of course, that happens from time to time.

AndrewKemendo• 2 years ago

Ah yes the coming winter

KETpXDDzR• 2 years ago

Earlier today, Emad Mostaque resigned from his role as CEO of Stability AI and from his position on the Board of Directors of the company to pursue decentralized AI.

Reading explanations of "decentralized AI" [0] sounds like a sales pitch for investors that missed out on the AI and crypto hype. Technically, it sounds like a distributed file storage which already exists.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/02/24/decen...

Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

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