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.
Translation of “stepping down to focus on distributed AI”:
Getting fired and making moves to capitalize on the current crypto boom while it lasts
I interviewed at Stability AI a while ago and that interview was a complete shit show. They quite literally spent 40 minutes talking about Emad and his "vision". I think we actually talked about what they wanted me to do there for like 15 minutes.
I was not feeling confident about them as a company that I wanted to work for before that interview, afterwards I knew that was a company I wouldn't work for.
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…
"Decentralised" AI probably means something to do with crypto. Like mint this ocin to get access to that model? That's my guess.
Not twitter but here he is talking about that: https://youtu.be/BdZo4JUBSQk
You know it never ceases to amaze me how even the most respected fall prey to this money laundering scheme. If people even spent some time to read about Tether they would not touch this stuff. It's blood money.
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…
wow I did NOT know this
I wonder how many ppl among VC/PE circles are also sugar coating their experiences and successes
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 t…
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'm pretty sure Elon Musk also didn't believe in "FSD in 6 months" every time he said it, but it was just marketing.
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…
He did provide thousands of GPUs for training all those open-source and open-weights models, no?
Maybe… he certainly was good at taking credit for it. Not course if they stepped in, rebranded something they didn’t make and threw a bunch of AwS GPUs they couldn’t actually afford at it though
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.
Image quality, stylistic variety, and resolution are much better than ChatGPT. Prompt following is a little better with ChatGPT, but MJ v6 has narrowed the gap.