Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

stability.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 429 posts

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#51

Post by epivosism »

famouswaffles wrote: post #45
Satam wrote: 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'…

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.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#52

Post by anonylizard »

ec109685 wrote: post #20

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 pr…

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'.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#53

Post by Satam »

famouswaffles wrote: post #45
Satam wrote: 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'…

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.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#54

Post by gunapologist99 »

__loam wrote: post #27
rvz wrote: post #10

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…

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

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

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#57

Post by anonylizard »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #36

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

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.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#58

Post by loeg »

kleinsch wrote: post #50
ctrw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah, certainly within an order of magnitude of that number.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#59

Post by __loam »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #54
__loam wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Surely the same strategy will work during economic contraction and a period of high interest rates and borrowing costs.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#60

Post by dragonwriter »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #21

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.

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

They already pivoted away from open-licensed models.

Post reply on HN