Wow, the comments seems mean spirited. I would say Thanks for releasing open source models and accepting to pass the torch
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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
#112Maybe 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”
I’m practicality shaking my head in disbelief at all the red flags this guy has and people are still defending him. Stability and its work are great. We should support an open community and ethos. And Emad can still be a shady narcissist con man. These are all compatible views.
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a founder maybe , definitely not for employees . AI startups need not an insignificant amount of startup capital , you cannot just spend weekends to build like you would a saas app . Model training is expensive so only wealthy individuals can even consider this route Companies like that have no oversight or control mechanisms when management inevitably goes down crazy paths, also without external valuations optio…
As a counter-point, with no VCs there's more equity left for employees.
If valued $2bn then even a 0.1% is $2m. Not bad.
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#114He'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.
Like “here is a rug” let me pull it for you!
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#115The 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'…
>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.
The more I think about the AI space the more I realize that open sourcing large models is pointless now.
Until you can reasonably buy a rig to run the model there is simply no point in doing this. It's no like you will be edified by setting the weights either.
I think an ethical business model for these business is to release whatever model can fit into a $10,000 machine and keeping the rest closed source until above machine is able to run them.
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tens of millions of freeloaders too.
...and thousands of enterprise customers translating into billions of dollars worth of deals. The point is, OpenAI can afford to have free-loaders as long as their deals from enterprise, governments are paying for the service. Midjourney doesn't have a free plan so no free-loaders there and they're making $200M+ with no VCs. Stability.ai will always suffer from free-loaders due to their fully open source AI.
Sounds like a fairly precarious position they’re in though. This isn’t some new magic tech anymore.
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#117Really 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 don’t know much about him. Was he into cryptocurrency before AI?
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#118I 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 a…
There are
almost no programmers today (you need to do malloc and low level sys calls in C to be considered a programmer).
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#119His shares still have majority vote and full board control.
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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