Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Early employees may have gotten 2-3% and are completely undiluted.
Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
121–130 of 429 posts
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#122He'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…
A few years ago it was all about democratized AI
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the current limitations of AI in mind, it often looks like a solution looking for a problem. It's too unreliable, slow, dumb, and too expensive for a lot of the tasks companies would like to use it for. And that becomes part of the problem because it's hard to sell unreliable technology unless you design the product in a way that plays well with the current shortcomings. We will get there, but it's still a few i…
I don't think it's that SD and LLMs are solutions looking for problems, it's that there are very clear problems to which they provide 90% of a solution and make it impossible to clear the last 10%. They're the new WYSIWYG/low-code. Everyone that doesn't fully understand the problem space thinks they're some ultimate solution that is going to revolutionise everything. People that do are responding with a resounding 'm…
Pretty much what happened with Speech Recognition for 30 years. That last 10% had to be handled manually. Even if you get 90% right, it still means ever second sentence has issues. And as things scale up the costs of all that manual behind the scenes hacking scale up too. We underestimated how many issues involved Ambiguity - where N people see the same thing and have N different interpretations. So you see a whole bunch of Speech Rec companies rising and falling over time.
Now things are pretty mature, but it took decades to get there but there is still a whole bunch of hacks upon hacks behind the scenes. Same story will repeat with each new problem domain.
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#124Earlier 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.
Amazon was ruthless at making money from day 0.
Amazon was famous for not taking profit, and instead putting profit back into the company, but revenue? Amazon was generating gobs and gobs and gobs of revenue from day 0.
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#125Emad is such an obvious grifter it’s honestly mad that he attracted so much VC money.
He couldn’t even get his own story straight regarding his education and qualifications which should be a pretty clear disqualifying red flag from the outset.
The Forbes article from last year was dismissed on here as a hit piece but the steady flow of talent out was the clear sign, capped by the original SD authors leaving last week (probably after some vesting event or external funding coming through).
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#126OpenAI? closed source. Stability AI? facing instability. Startup idea: Unprofitable.ai
Accenture : $1.1 billion GenAI projects!
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#127Previous 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…
> This was viewed as insane in the pre-ChatGPT era, and only paid off massively in retrospect.
Paid off how?
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#128Looks like he went to crypto https://x.com/sreeramkannan/status/1771340250801127664?s=46
Decentralized systems, peer to peer, Blockchain, smart contracts, are all important technologies with real use cases. It is not accurate to refer to any of them as simply "crypto" especially in this context.
Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#129Really 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.
> Really sad to see. Emad pivoting to posting crypto nonsense on twitter made me think the writing is on the wall for Stability Open-source AI is a race to zero that makes little money and Stability was facing lawsuits (especially with Getty) which are mounting into the millions and the company was already burning tens of millions. Despite being the actual "Open AI", Stability cannot afford to sustain itself doing so…
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Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
#130I guess SD3 will never be released, then. What a pity. :-/
That's my guess too. Emad teased SD3 while it looked like he was looking for more money, but without convincing rationale for not releasing it already. The samples may have been heavily cherry-picked, we don't know if it's actually a decent model in practice.