Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

Access to patents?

I've spent the last half hour trying to figure out what this company is, and I still have no idea. My first stop was their website and I could not find a single sentence providing concrete details regarding their value proposition. It's just a bunch of vacuous statements which paint themselves as some sort of iconoclastic visionaries. Please do check it out for yourself and tell me it's not just a bunch of nonsense. For further evidence that this company hates concrete ideas and coherent sentences, head over to the founder's twitter and read his bio.

Anyways, if you scroll past the hand waving on their site, the first thing they tout is their developer communities. What exactly is a developer community? Do these communities belong to Stability? Does Stability own the research/models produced by these communities? I don't understand the value of this section at all. It seems to be just a list of ill-defined and loosely connected organizations with no clear relation to Stability.

Lastly, I am well aware of what stable diffusion is, but I still am not sure what the relationship is between Stability AI and the researchers that developed the stable diffusion model. As far as I can tell, Stability AI simply provided the compute for model training. None of the researchers list any affiliation with Stability in their publications (or elsewhere that I looked). And if this is the case, is there any reason to expect Stability to stay on the forefront of AI research? Or are they just going to open source models in the wake of actual research done by other organizations? How is lending compute to other researchers a viable business model, let alone one worth a 1B valuation? Is their stable diffusion API/Studio that much better than all the others?

Are these investors reputable? My first impression would be that they are drastically overestimating the competitive edge that Stability has.

> I've spent the last half hour trying to figure out what this company is, and I still have no idea. My first stop was their website and I could not find a single sentence providing concrete details regarding their value proposition.

As much as it sucks, they don't owe the general public an explanation of their business plan. They apparently have access to investors and can explain it to them directly.

> but I still am not sure what the relationship is between Stability AI and the researchers that developed the stable diffusion model.

Another post trending on HN today about data laundering says that Stable AI funds the university research behind Stable Diffusion. The data laundering comes from the university using otherwise copyrighted data for "research purposes" and Stable AI can in turn use the trained model commercially, sidestepping the fact that the underlying data is not available for commercial purposes.

Another way to read that situation is simply that it is easier to outsource your research than build your own team.

> We’re completely independent

After taking $100 million of other people's money, were they born yesterday?

This is quite stunning. OpenAI valuations are quoted as $3B. Stability AI just popped up6 months ago and is able to raise rounds in very tough economy at $1B valuation. The real differentiator between two is that Stability AI has took upon itself to o democratize AI ignoring all social wokness and thereby multiplying their efforts many manifold through community labor. OpenAI meanwhile is still deeply caught up in all kind of social/ethical/philosophical delima as well as Apple-isc secrecy as devotional offerings to Steve Jobs.

With this level of funding and community following, Stability AI is en route to dethrone OpenAI in almost no time.