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Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

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Re: Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

#22
post #20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We’re completely independent After taking $100 million of other people's money, were they born yesterday?

New way of founding allows founders to retain 100% control. Facebook and Google are examples in their early years.

Owning voting shares is quite different from being independent. Investors had plenty of influence on those companies regardless of the founders setting up dual class shares.

If you think a startup with investors operates the same way as one without, and that it can be independent the same way, I'm not sure what to say.

Re: Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DreamStudio got one million users already, generating 17 million images. Granting that most people don't pay in (I got $2 credit for 200 generations by logging in), a $10/1000 images is still, ah, good enough I'd say. Especially if they stayed fresh by agglutinating all the advances in the open ecosystem.

You aren’t factoring in the cost of running the model on GPU instances. They might make a bit, not sure if it’s enough to satisfy their investors.

The investors are buying into a toolset for what will potentially become open source AGI that is already blowing the competition out of the water in terms of capabilities, speed of development, and access/reach. Add together large language models with text and code interpretation/generation + diffusion + vision + speech and sound + embodiment = what might you get?

It's unlikely investors care more than an inkling about the cashflow positivity of a (really fun to use, admittedly awesome) stock image synthesis engine other than its demonstrated impact as a stepping stone and buzz generator. I suspect their pitch was a little bit broader in scope than making Getty redundant.

VC exit is over a 10+ year horizon -- people writing cheques are looking to own a piece of the future, as is the case with all catchy narratives, but in this case the future is already here and publicly disclosed progress in the field appears to be accelerating rapidly in no small part due to Stability AI and the research communities they support.

Re: Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

#24
post #13

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.…

There is an interesting interview with "the man behind Stable Diffusion" at youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ2QtKcK2dA

Re: Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

#26
post #19

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 al…

both numbers are total BS

I'd love to see the SEC start requiring VCs to underwrite these idiotic "valuation" numbers...you say its worth $1 bln, you need to be prepared and required to potentially buy back pre-IPO shares from invested parties at that valuation

now watch those values drop, rapidly

did we not learn anything from Uber being "valued" at $150bln?

Re: Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

#27
post #25

No idea what they do.

Taken from their website, they seem to have a range of products like:

- eleutherai: A decentralised collective focusing on AI alignment

- Laion: A community-driven non-profit organisation devoted to making large-scale AI openly accessible.

- DreamStudio: Open-sourced image generation model that cultivates autonomous freedom to produce incredible imagery.

- ... few more things with a bunch of nice words I can't make sense of like their coming soon DeepFloyd that is about "Discovering new facets of Multimodality."

The only thing I could get that point to something concrete is the link to their github which was created end of August of this year from which they seem to claim: "Our vibrant communities consist of experts, leaders and partners across the globe. They are developing cutting-edge open AI models for Image, Language, Audio, Video, 3D and Biology"

Re: Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

#28
post #19

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 al…

Microsoft invested $1B in OpenAI in 2019, the valuation is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $5-20B.

Re: Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

#29
post #13

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.…

>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?

Even if this was the case, turns out this is more valuable than just holding the model close to your chest and not letting people use it, build off it.

Re: Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

#30
post #19

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 al…

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