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Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

stability.ai

41–50 of 429 posts

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#41
post #18

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

OpenAI and midjourney have millions of paying customers.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#42

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”

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.

> not enough funding

They have raised 110M in October.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#43
post #37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I don't think it's that SD and LLMs are solutions looking for problems, it's that there are very clear problems to which they provide 90% of a solution and make it impossible to clear the last 10%. They're the new WYSIWYG/low-code. Everyone that doesn't fully understand the problem space thinks they're some ultimate solution that is going to revolutionise everything. People that do are responding with a resounding 'm…

A game with no consistency in the art is probably enabled. We've crossed the threshold where something like Magic the Gathering could be recreated by a tiny team and a low budget.

I don't think the limiting factor here is the software; it looks like we got AI-generated art pretty much as soon as consumer graphics cards could handle it (10 years ago it would have been quite hard). I'd be measuring progress in hardware generations not years and from that perspective Stable Diffusion is young.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#44
post #18

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

OpenAI and midjourney have millions of paying customers.

Tens of millions of freeloaders too.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#45
post #18

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

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.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#47
post #18

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

OpenAI and midjourney have millions of paying customers.

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.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#48
post #37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I don't think it's that SD and LLMs are solutions looking for problems, it's that there are very clear problems to which they provide 90% of a solution and make it impossible to clear the last 10%. They're the new WYSIWYG/low-code. Everyone that doesn't fully understand the problem space thinks they're some ultimate solution that is going to revolutionise everything. People that do are responding with a resounding 'm…

Palworld

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#49
post #37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I don't think it's that SD and LLMs are solutions looking for problems, it's that there are very clear problems to which they provide 90% of a solution and make it impossible to clear the last 10%. They're the new WYSIWYG/low-code. Everyone that doesn't fully understand the problem space thinks they're some ultimate solution that is going to revolutionise everything. People that do are responding with a resounding 'm…

And even a lot of the hentai is fucking worthless for the same reasons! Try generating some kinbaku. It's really hard to get something where all the rope actually connects and interacts sensibly because it doesn't actually know what a knot is. Instead, you end up with M. C. Escher: Fetish Edition.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#50
post #32

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 rati…

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.

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...

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