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Stability AI Raises $101M at $1B valuation

techcrunch.com

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

#31

Post by hackerfromthefu »

learndeeply wrote: post #28
sytelus wrote: 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.

Wasn't that only in Azure credits or somesuch?

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

#33

Post by ignoramous »

ansk wrote: 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.…

> As far as I can tell, Stability AI simply provided the compute for model training.

As models grow complex, Compute is what's holding back AI from mass production and consumption [0]. And so whoever figures out a way to give away Compute for inference and training is likely going to be able to provide the resulting service at much competitive rates to keep the flywheel going?

Sort of similar to Google and Chrome/Search/YouTube/Android, where even if untold billions are spent to build and run the software (Compute), to the end-user (AI researchers) it costs virtually nothing, while Ads continue to bring in revenue (APIs / services).

I see StabilityAI as Yang to OpenAI's Ying. And I believe, that's where the upstart's evaluation stems from.

[0] The new business of AI (future.com), https://archive.is/g4bEe

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

#34

Post by htrp »

ansk wrote: 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.…

Coatue is literally the definition of an unsophisticated investor. Their AI investments and initiatives have been disasters thus far.

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

#35

Post by mark_l_watson »

brownfox wrote: post #18
ansk wrote: 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.…

They wrap up studies into API calls or applications, which being sold to developers or end users. These second-tier AI company don't need the be the best. "Good enough" with competitive pricing will do.

Thanks. So they will offer similar APIs as OpenAI and Hugging Face?

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

#36

Post by mark_l_watson »

codeflo wrote: post #16

Stable Diffusion is simply fantastic, we live in great times to have such a thing as open-source to play with. And however justified the skepticism expressed in other HN comments might be, I truly hope they figure out a business model that’s compatible with continuing to make these releases. Otherwise, it’s forever going to be DeepMind’s “we actually have much better models, no you can’t see them, they go to a differ…

Are OpenAI’s prices really “insane”? I have been using their GPT-3 based APIs for probably close to a year, and they seem really inexpensive compared to running a server myself with the required memory and compute, not to mention convenience. I am just starting to use some Hugging Face APIs, but so far I don’t have enough experience to talk about them.

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

#37

Post by mark_l_watson »

napier wrote: post #23
ShamelessC wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

Leading to AGI? I have been using deep learning professionally for about seven years (and neural networks since the 1980s with a commercial product and I wrote the model for SAIC’s bomb detector they did for the FAA).

Personally, as awesomely useful as deep learning is, I don’t see the path to AGI. I think AGI will be a hybrid of DL, GOFAI, and things not yet invented.

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

#38

Post by drawingthesun »

type4 wrote: post #7

Makes the stalling on releasing 1.5 publicly more understandable. Hopefully they won't become the next "OpenAI" but the material incentives are not aligned with public releases.

Emad said on Twitter that this funding round completed 8 weeks ago and it was the last few weeks he has been stalling.

For over a month after the funding round completed he was eager to release as much as he could, including 1.5

My read on the issue is that either of (or all) the following is causing some concern:

1. The severe pushback from artists regarding the fact that the model is trained on living artists artworks.

2. Almost every implementation removed the nudity filters.

https://mobile.twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1582055542960230...

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

#40

Post by miohtama »

sytelus wrote: 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…

In the articlr it says Stability AI was founded 2 years ago, so they are not popping out from nothing.
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