What is the story here? Stability funded a model that came off the LMU paper?
They certainly did that better than the way OpenAI did, or Midjourney did.
Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
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Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
#12What is the story here? Stability funded a model that came off the LMU paper? They certainly did that better than the way OpenAI did, or Midjourney did.
That they funded the model is not in question. It is that they claimed they owned the IP to said model in pitches/messaging to investors when they in fact, did not.
Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
#13Dumb hit-piece, Stability's contribution was vital to the creation of those models. Article doesn't even make the claim that the investors were confused on if Stability owned the models, it just insinuates they were for absolutely no reason.
Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
#14I don't remember Stability claiming in any public forum that they solely developed Stable Diffusion. In fact the first stable diffusion model on Hugging Face is under CompVis Org. They had an issue with Runway with a model takedown or something but I think that was sorted out later on. I don't know why the article seems desparately trying to show Stability in bad light while they have in fact funded a lot of AI model…
> I don't remember Stability claiming in any public forum that they solely developed Stable Diffusion This article makes no such claim. It is about whether or not investors knew.
Investors probably shouldn't be chucking $100m+ at startups without doing the bare minimum of DD if that's the point of contention here...
Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
#15The model was initially released in August 22, 2022, and everything from the GitHub organization that hosted the code, to the actual licenses being around and all the communication made it very clear that there was a bunch of groups involved with the model; Runway, CompVis, and Stability AI
Then Stability AI raised money from investors in October 2022.
Are you really telling me these investors didn't even do any sort of due diligence (not even "barely any" but literally any at all), didn't realized that Stable Diffusion was the work of many, and checked the license of the model and code?
That's a bit far fetched, to be honest.
Supposedly, this "leaked pitch deck" is supposed to show us that they lied to investors, but where is the pitch deck itself? Seemingly, only one of the slides is in the article, how could anyone reach any sort of conclusion based on just one slide?
Edit: The article seems to be some sort of clickbait trash that is so rampant around the web... One selected part:
> The Stable Diffusion code was released by researchers at LMU Munich in April 2022.
Links to https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10752 which is the Version 2 of the paper, indeed released in April 2022. However, that paper is about, and links to https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion which is not Stable Diffusion, it's Latent Diffusion. Stable Diffusion was released in August 2022, and is at https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
#16What is the story here? Stability funded a model that came off the LMU paper? They certainly did that better than the way OpenAI did, or Midjourney did.
That they funded the model is not in question. It is that they claimed they owned the IP to said model in pitches/messaging to investors when they in fact, did not.
Yes, even if they did do that which they didn't, that is also what OpenAI, etc do with their models like GPT and Dall-E when infact they come off papers like Transformers is all you need and the same LMU paper.
Stability has done it better since they purposely acknowledge the researchers instead of the way the public domain research is just used to make their own model with no acknowledgements (no co created mention anywhere). OpenAI would say 'co created by Google' if they did.
Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
#17I don't remember Stability claiming in any public forum that they solely developed Stable Diffusion. In fact the first stable diffusion model on Hugging Face is under CompVis Org. They had an issue with Runway with a model takedown or something but I think that was sorted out later on. I don't know why the article seems desparately trying to show Stability in bad light while they have in fact funded a lot of AI model…
Emad also put up ~$20M of his own (real!) money for the initial compute. And released everything as OSS.
Its just sad to see such a negative article.
There are, however, fair questions about valuation and (lack of) moat.
Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
#18Another poorly reported hit-piece from Sifted. This is a non-event. Anyone who’s been close to fundraising knows that investors expect founders to build a narrative and do their own due diligence.
Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
#19The model was initially released in August 22, 2022, and everything from the GitHub organization that hosted the code, to the actual licenses being around and all the communication made it very clear that there was a bunch of groups involved with the model; Runway, CompVis, and Stability AI Then Stability AI raised money from investors in October 2022. Are you really telling me these investors didn't even do any sort…
How is that far fetched? There are plenty of recent examples where investors didn’t do enough due diligence in projects seeking huge valuations.
And why are you putting leaked pitch deck in quotes?
Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors
#20Lying and fraud aren’t ok, and founders should be held to account for that. But this doesn’t seem like that. It seems like any disappointed investors just didn’t do the bare minimum you’d expect with an investment of $100m.
There's no report from any investors who suggest they were confused about IP/original-work in any way. There is an assertion to the contrary in the article: "Stability told Sifted that the investors that backed the company were fully aware of Stable Diffusion’s IP ownership."
So while it's possible investors just don't want to admit they didn't look too deep, it's also possible everyone relevant knew exactly what was being offered: a fast-moving team of opportunists, adapting core tech originating elsewhere. That alone is plenty valuable in a hot area. 'Fast-followers', rollups, & integrators can do great in a tech boom.
So, this story might mainly be resentful competitors/employees taking potshots. (Or maybe even: potential next-round investors trying to win for themselves a lower-valuation via media spin.)