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Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

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Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#71

Post by bruce511 »

yreg wrote: post #46

I love their product, but I was suspect of Emad ever since he said “There will be no programmers in five years.”[0] That just sounds so simplistic that I don't believe he believes it himself. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stability-ai-ceo-no-human-193...

I think when parsing that statement it's important to understand his (and your) definition of "programmer".

We (I) tend to use the term "programmer" in a generic way, encompassing a bunch of tasks waaay beyond "just typing in new code". Whereas I suspect he used it in the narrowest possible definition (literally, code-typer).

My day job (which I call programming) consists of needs analysis, data-modelling, workflow and UI design, coding, documenting, presenting, iterating, debugging, extending, and cycling through this loop multiple times. All while collaborating with customers, managers, co-workers, check-writers and so on.

AI can do -some- of that. And it can do small bits of it really well. It will improve in some of the other bits.

Plus, a new job description will appear- "prompt engineer".

As an aside I prefer the term "software developer " for what I do, I think it's a better description than "programmer".

Maybe one day there'll be an AI that can do software development. Developers that don't need to eat, sleep, or take a piss. But not today.

(P.S. to companies looking to make money with AI - make them able to replace me in Zoom meetings. I'd pay for that...)

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#72

Post by ImprobableTruth »

ctrw wrote: post #32
minimaxir wrote: post #3

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.

Transmission speeds aren't fast enough for this, unless you crank up the batch size ridiculously high.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#73

Post by bamboozled »

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.

I am quite sure Google had a lot to offer from day one, which is why they were encouraged to start the business. There wasn’t any open source Google’s.

Yes maybe the business model wasn’t perfect but ad revenue was already well and truly a thing by the time Google invented a better search engine. All they had to do was serve the ads and the rest is history.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#74

Post by teaearlgraycold »

yreg wrote: post #46

I love their product, but I was suspect of Emad ever since he said “There will be no programmers in five years.”[0] That just sounds so simplistic that I don't believe he believes it himself. [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stability-ai-ceo-no-human-193...

Well it's been almost a year since he said that. You would think we'd have lost the first chunk of programmers to AI by now.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#75

Post by joegibbs »

yreg wrote: post #42
joegibbs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yet for the 6 months before that they were talking about running out of money, and even the month after they got funded were considering selling the company due to money issues.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#76

Post by andrewljohnson »

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'…

I wonder if MidJourney is still ripping. I’m actually curious if it’s superior to ChatGPT’s Dall-E images… I switched and cancelled my subscription when ChatGPT added images, but I think I was mostly focused on convenience.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#77

Post by teaearlgraycold »

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'…

> $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees.

The dream

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