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Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

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Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#31

Post by rvz »

ShamelessC wrote: post #19
capableweb wrote: post #15

The model was initially released in August 22, 2022, and everything from the GitHub organization that hosted the code, to the actual licenses being around and all the communication made it very clear that there was a bunch of groups involved with the model; Runway, CompVis, and Stability AI Then Stability AI raised money from investors in October 2022. Are you really telling me these investors didn't even do any sort…

How is that far fetched? There are plenty of recent examples where investors didn’t do enough due diligence in projects seeking huge valuations. And why are you putting leaked pitch deck in quotes?

> There are plenty of recent examples where investors didn’t do enough due diligence in projects seeking huge valuations.

Exactly. This reminds me of Fast.co [0] who recently shutdown after attempting to raise more VC capital when it was revealed that they only made 600K and with a very high burn rate.

I don't see how it is so difficult for many commenters here to see that investors were mislead by the claims made by Stability.ai's IP, and now they're also are burning cash with questionable revenues being generated whilst begging to VCs again to raise at a higher valuation.

Some of these investors just run into hype and get burned repeatedly and never learn from FOMO.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/05/fast-shuts-doors-after-slo...

Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#32

Post by anonylizard »

ericflo wrote: post #4

I think in the world of ML, contributing that much compute should count as co-creation. There is a lot of code published by academia that just needs compute and data, but they don't receive it. Stability deserves credit for Doing the Thing. IP rights are another thing but that's a whole subtree of legal questions that society is barreling towards.

People have to remember, back in 2022-08, AI was still not a big thing. DALLE-2 was only released 2 months ago, and was just a quickly forgotten novelty.

Emad had to have funded the training of SD even before DALLE-2, investing the cash in exchange for branding rights to a free model.

Its obviously an extremely good bet in retrospect (RunwayML is probably bleeding with regret), giving stability herculean name recognition despite not having done any high profile research themselves. But when the bet was made, it was quite an insane bet requiring a lot of vision.

Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#33

Post by Havoc »

>what official affiliation there was between Stability and EleutherAI, they said: “None.”

That's wild. Handing out a bunch of cash for nothing except vague association. No control? No equity? No IP?

Reminds me of marketing. Cola puts logos on t-shirts of players and proclaims to have sponsored them, but I have yet to see cola claim to have "co-scored" a goal.

Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#34

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #24

Whoa. So I got a DM on Twitter about a week ago thanking me for pushing back on Emad’s claims about cluster pricing. I didn’t really take it seriously (or understand it) till now: https://i.imgur.com/5XAndrR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/OAZeZEl.jpg So for whatever that’s worth, here’s a claim that predates this article by a week that emad was lying about stability origins to investors. I’ve trimmed the name off the DM for…

[deleted]

Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#35

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

eachro wrote: post #23
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #13

Dumb hit-piece, Stability's contribution was vital to the creation of those models. Article doesn't even make the claim that the investors were confused on if Stability owned the models, it just insinuates they were for absolutely no reason.

There is absolutely a reason ...

What reason? Did they have an investor tell them they were misled? It's not in the article. Did Stability hide anything about who made the models? Again not in the article. It's content-less insinuations.

Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#36

Post by anonylizard »

algo_trader wrote: post #22
capableweb wrote: post #15

The model was initially released in August 22, 2022, and everything from the GitHub organization that hosted the code, to the actual licenses being around and all the communication made it very clear that there was a bunch of groups involved with the model; Runway, CompVis, and Stability AI Then Stability AI raised money from investors in October 2022. Are you really telling me these investors didn't even do any sort…

My pet theory is that Stability was a surprise viral hit during aug/sep. Then got a massive capital round. And NOW, growth is already slowing and investors are getting buyers-remorse? Or maybe growth is accelerating, and those who passed on series-A are upset? Or maybe the lizard men are involved?

Stability never had any revenue, nor any easy ways to measure their user base. Their 'growth' is basically dependant on them being able to release open source models that get so popular, unbeatable ecosystems get formed around them.

On this front. SD1.4/1.5 is extremely successful, but there has been no followup. SD2.0 was a total disaster that shocked the community, SD2.1 is still no better than SD1.5. StableLM currently is still a joke in performance. Like, they don't seem to even test their models before releasing them.

Compare their releases, to the polished and immediately dominant releases from OpenAI, and you have to question their researching chops. Did they only succeed with SD1.4 because of collaboration with other companies?

Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#37

Post by z3c0 »

szundi wrote: post #27
capableweb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is that far fetched? There are plenty of recent examples where investors didn’t do enough due diligence in projects seeking huge valuations. Is there examples of investors investing in a project without even visiting the homepage of the project or trying to understand even 0.1% of what the project is about? I don't think it's super common, but maybe I'm not hanging around the right/wrong circles in SV. > And wh…

Yes it happens all the time. Check out the FTX story and many others

I'm not sure how one could equate a lack of DD to deliberately misleading investors.

Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#38

Post by anonylizard »

Havoc wrote: post #33

>what official affiliation there was between Stability and EleutherAI, they said: “None.” That's wild. Handing out a bunch of cash for nothing except vague association. No control? No equity? No IP? Reminds me of marketing. Cola puts logos on t-shirts of players and proclaims to have sponsored them, but I have yet to see cola claim to have "co-scored" a goal.

All AI companies used to release their top tier research into the open. Google doesn't have control/equity/IP over the transformer paper.

GPT-J and co are GPT-2 equivalents, that are not actually useful in any way. So its more just building up the open source ecosystem.

Stability did get the branding rights to SD1.4, they spent a few million to get incredible name recognition out of nowhere, in the hottest and most competitive tech space ever. Those sponsored alphago tournaments costed way more and had less reputational impact than the millions using SD every day.

Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#39

Post by capableweb »

anonylizard wrote: post #36
algo_trader wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet theory is that Stability was a surprise viral hit during aug/sep. Then got a massive capital round. And NOW, growth is already slowing and investors are getting buyers-remorse? Or maybe growth is accelerating, and those who passed on series-A are upset? Or maybe the lizard men are involved?

Stability never had any revenue, nor any easy ways to measure their user base. Their 'growth' is basically dependant on them being able to release open source models that get so popular, unbeatable ecosystems get formed around them. On this front. SD1.4/1.5 is extremely successful, but there has been no followup. SD2.0 was a total disaster that shocked the community, SD2.1 is still no better than SD1.5. StableLM curr…

> Stability never had any revenue, nor any easy ways to measure their user base

They do, for the products they have/will have. Right now, I think it's only DreamStudio, but like any SaaS product, they can and surely do measure the amount of users, and trivial for them to see the revenue.

What you're talking about, the models they help release, are not products themselves, more like research output they give away for free. Probably in order to drive users to their paid products.

Re: Leaked deck raises questions over Stability AI’s Series A pitch to investors

#40

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

amrrs wrote: post #3

I don't remember Stability claiming in any public forum that they solely developed Stable Diffusion. In fact the first stable diffusion model on Hugging Face is under CompVis Org. They had an issue with Runway with a model takedown or something but I think that was sorted out later on. I don't know why the article seems desparately trying to show Stability in bad light while they have in fact funded a lot of AI model…

Some of their behaviour over the past year makes me feel the company has a culture which doesn't hold honesty as a core value.

The Runway takedown or something your refer to was Stability sending a takedown request to HuggingFace claiming an IP leak over the publication of version 1.5 by their academic partners Runway. That was sorted out, if you want to call it that, after massive public outcry and Emad claiming it was just confusion on HuggingFace's part. HuggingFace then confirmed Stability's legal team contacted them to retract the request afterward.

Then there was the incident where they contacted Discord to take over the main StableDifussion channel without informing the owner. There was also the incident where they convinced the owner of the main stable diffusion subreddit to give them mod rights and removed all other mods as well as any info and mentions related to one of the most widely used StableDiffusion tool (Automatic1111).

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