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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

#271

Post by ptero »

JimDabell wrote: post #239
famouswaffles wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> Seriously this seemed to be the plan: > Step 1: Release SD for free > Step 2: ??? > Step 3: Profit That’s not true. He was pretty open about the business plan. The plan was to have open foundational models and provide services to governments and corporations that wanted custom models trained on private data, tailored to their specific jurisdictions and problem domains.

Was there any traction on this? I cannot imagine government services being early customers. What models would the want?Military -- maybe, for simulation or training, but that requires focus, dedicated effort and a lot of time. My 2c.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#272

Post by Hendrikto »

achow wrote: post #266
jacky2wong wrote: post #256

I think Stability is in an interesting situation. A few suggestions on its direction and current state: 1. Stability AI's loss of talent at the foundational research layer is worrying. They've lost an incredibly expensive moat and there's enough unsolved problems in the foundation layer (faster models, more energy efficient models, etc.) to ensure Stability provides differentiated offerings. Step 1 should be rectifyi…

> Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack for image generation or video generation would be a great focal point for Stability that separates itself from the competition. People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves their problems. Recently, during an interview [1], when questioned about OpenAI's Sora, Shantanu Narayen (Adobe CEO) gave an interesting persp…

> Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker

I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and their UI/UX and how they don’t understand their customers.

Never really used any of their products myself though. Maybe they still are best-in-class. I can’t tell.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#273

Post by bamboozled »

Hendrikto wrote: post #272
achow wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack for image generation or video generation would be a great focal point for Stability that separates itself from the competition. People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves their problems. Recently, during an interview [1], when questioned about OpenAI's Sora, Shantanu Narayen (Adobe CEO) gave an interesting persp…

> Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and their UI/UX and how they don’t understand their customers. Never really used any of their products myself though. Maybe they still are best-in-class. I can’t tell.

People love illustrator

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#274

Post by achow »

Hendrikto wrote: post #272
achow wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack for image generation or video generation would be a great focal point for Stability that separates itself from the competition. People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves their problems. Recently, during an interview [1], when questioned about OpenAI's Sora, Shantanu Narayen (Adobe CEO) gave an interesting persp…

> Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and their UI/UX and how they don’t understand their customers. Never really used any of their products myself though. Maybe they still are best-in-class. I can’t tell.

Sure there maybe scope of improvement in the products, but the point is they have $Billions in sale (year on year) to those customers (Ad agencies, movie studios etc.).

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#275

Post by andy99 »

Hendrikto wrote: post #272
achow wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack for image generation or video generation would be a great focal point for Stability that separates itself from the competition. People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves their problems. Recently, during an interview [1], when questioned about OpenAI's Sora, Shantanu Narayen (Adobe CEO) gave an interesting persp…

> Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and their UI/UX and how they don’t understand their customers. Never really used any of their products myself though. Maybe they still are best-in-class. I can’t tell.

I don't know Adobe's business so could be wrong, but maybe "creatives" are not their key customers? If they're focusing on enterprise sales, they're selling to enterprise decision makers.

Every user hates using microsoft products, and don't get me started on SAP. But these are gigantic companies with wildly successful products aimed at enterprise customers.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#276

Post by andy_ppp »

bamboozled wrote: post #273
Hendrikto wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and their UI/UX and how they don’t understand their customers. Never really used any of their products myself though. Maybe they still are best-in-class. I can’t tell.

People love illustrator

People also hate illustrator

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#277

Post by ajb »

mirekrusin wrote: post #230
sigmoid10 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong. What you described is data parallelism and it would indeed be very tricky to e.g. sync gradients across machines. But this is not the only method of training neural nets (transformers or any other kind) in parallel. If we'd like to train, say, a human brain complexity level model with 10^15 parameters, we'd need a model parallelism approach anyways. It introduces a bit of complexity since you need to ma…

Lack of data parallelism is implied by computation that is performed. You gradient descend on your state. Each step needs to work on up to date state otherwise you're computing gradient descend from state that doesn't exist anymore and your computed gradient descent delta is nonsensical if applied to the most recent state (it was calculated on old one, direction that your computation calculated is now wrong). You als…

Openai had a more distributable algorithm: https://openai.com/research/evolution-strategies

But given that they don't seem to have worked on it since, I guess it wasn't too successful. But maybe there is a way

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#278

Post by throwaway2037 »

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'…

First paragraph: These are wild stats. Thank you to share. How did they fund themselves, if no external funding?

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#279

Post by mike_hearn »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #77
famouswaffles wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Only if your costs are a lot lower than $200M, which given the price of GPU compute right now, is not guaranteed.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#280

Post by VHRanger »

throw23324 wrote: post #205
ShamelessC wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's true. Latin America already knows it, USA and Europe are yet to catch up. Most of crypto is bullshit, but at the very least Bitcoin is a massive, massive use case.

The fact that you don't say what the usecase actually is kind of spoils your poiny
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