Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

stability.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 429 posts

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#291

Post by dpflan »

spxneo wrote: post #106
ec109685 wrote: post #20

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

It's the game to play. Asymmetric information with the goal to attain wealth, influence, power, ego-stroke, whatever opportunity is present.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#293

Post by oldgradstudent »

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

There are tools no one uses, and there are tools people constantly complain about.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#295

Post by burningion »

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.

Have been building a generative video editor and doing interviews with enterprise creative cloud users. Basically there’s a large knowledge investment in their tools, and adobe (so far) has shown that their user’s knowledge investment won’t become useless because adobe will continue to incorporate the future into their existing knowledge stack. Adobe doesn’t have to be the best, but just show they won’t miss the boat entirely with this next generation of tools.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#296

Post by bawana »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #212
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How slow? Depending on the task I fear it could be too slow to be useful. I believe there is some research on how to distribute large models across multiple GPUs, which could make the cost less lumpy.

You can get a decent approximation for LLM performance in tokens/second by dividing the model size in GB by the system's memory bandwidth. That's assuming it's well-optimized and memory rather than compute bound, but those are often both true or pretty close. And "depending on the task" is the point. There are systems that would be uselessly slow for real-time interaction but if your concern is to have it process con…

Why would increasing memory bandwidth reduce performance? You said "You can get a decent approximation for LLM performance in tokens/second by dividing the model size in GB by the system's memory bandwidth"

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#297

Post by oldgradstudent »

andy99 wrote: post #275
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.

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.

> Every user hates using microsoft products

Only because they've never had a chance to experience the competition.

Having worked in IBM and had to use the Lotus Office Suite I can tell you Microsoft won fair and square. And I'm not even talking about the detestable abomination that is Lotus Notes.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#298

Post by jacky2wong »

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…

Thanks for linking. I agree and strongly believe product companies are in the best position to monetize Gen AI. Existing distribution channels + companies being extremely fast to add AI features.

Where start-ups like Stability need to be rising to compete will have to be AI-native e.g. products re-thought of from the ground up like an AI image editor or as foundation-level AI research companies, agents or AI infrastructure companies.

There's no reason Stability can't play in both B2B and API if planned and strategized well and OpenAI can definitely pull it off with their tech and talent. But Stability has a few important differentiators from OpenAI where I believe if they launch an AI-native product in the multimodal space, they stand to differentiate significantly: - People join because they believed in Emad's vision of open source so it is their job to figure out a commercial model for open source. They can retain AI talent by ensuring a commitment to open source here. If they need to ensure their moat is retained and can commercialize, they should delay releasing model weights until a product surrounding the weights has been released first. Still open source and open weights but give them time to figure out a commercial strategy to capitalize their research. However because of this promise, they will not be able to license their technology to other companies. - Stability's strong research DNA (unsure about their engineering) is so badly fumbled by a lack of a cohesive product strategy that it leads to sub-par product releases. In agreement to the 3 'layers' argument, that's exactly Stability's greatest strength and weakness. Their focus on foundational models is incredibly strong and has come at the cost of the interface layer (and ultimately the data layer as it has a flywheel effect).

The company currently screams a need for effective leadership that can add on interface and data layers to their product strategy so they can build a strong moat outside of a strong research team which has shown it can disappear at any moment...

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#299

Post by jprete »

d-z-m wrote: post #259
rvz wrote: post #10

Looks like many AI startups are experiencing a bit of some turbulence and chaos in the recent months: First the OpenAI rebellion in November, then the Inflection AI acqui-hire from Microsoft not willing to pay the over-valued $4B and deflected that to $600M instead (after making $0 revenue) and now a bit of in-stability at Stability AI with the CEO resigning after many employees leaving. What does that say about the…

> OpenAI rebellion This phrasing makes me feel like we're living in some techno-future where corporations are de-facto governance apparatuses, squashing rebellion and dissidents :^)

Colonial companies did this all the time, e.g. the British East India Company, and the 1800s American railroads had the Pinkertons. There's also the phenomenon of the company town.
Post reply on HN