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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

#31

Post by nextworddev »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

He'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…

I’m guessing Emad sees the “rationale” in the recent revival of crypto prices - and the subsequent demand for altcoins

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#32

Post by ctrw »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

He'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…

Think seti at home.

Instead of wasting all the compute on bitcoin we pretrain fully open models which can run on people's hardware. A 120b ternary model is the most interesting thing in the world. No one can train one now because you need a billion dollar super computer.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#33

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

coolspot wrote: post #29
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…

He did provide thousands of GPUs for training all those open-source and open-weights models, no?

People forget, moving things around and funding them and making it all work is what makes an entrepreneur. Elon Musk did that and all great founders do that. Emad doesn't have to write the code himself.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#34

Post by echelon »

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

No. There can be tremendous value in AI, you just won't find it here.

The reason is that Stability.ai gave away everything for free. Until recently, they didn't even attempt to charge money for their models.

I've heard the only reason they're not already closed up is that they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota they leased out years ago. Companies are subletting from Stability, which locked in lots of long term GPU processing capacity.

There's no business plan here. This is the Movie Pass of AI.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#35

Post by __loam »

echelon wrote: post #34
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

No. There can be tremendous value in AI, you just won't find it here. The reason is that Stability.ai gave away everything for free . Until recently, they didn't even attempt to charge money for their models. I've heard the only reason they're not already closed up is that they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota they leased out years ago. Companies are subletting from Stability, which locked in lots of long ter…

It will be interesting to see when OpenAI gets as open about their costs as their revenue.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#37

Post by BigJono »

Satam wrote: post #30
minimaxir wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI businesses/models are capturing economic value: the problem is that costs are increasing much faster than revenue.

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 'meh'.

Stable Diffusion is a great example. Something that can generate consistent game assets would be an absolute game changer for the entire game industry and open up a new wave of high tech indie game development, but despite every "oh wow" demo hitting the front page of HN, we've had the tech for a couple of years now and the only thing that's come out of it is some janky half solutions (3D meshes from pictures that are unworkable in real games, still no way to generate assets in consistent styles without a huge amount of complex tinkering) and a bunch of fucking hentai lol.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#38

Post by __loam »

ctrw wrote: post #32
minimaxir wrote: post #3

He'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…

Think seti at home. Instead of wasting all the compute on bitcoin we pretrain fully open models which can run on people's hardware. A 120b ternary model is the most interesting thing in the world. No one can train one now because you need a billion dollar super computer.

I would expect most of the big tech firms have the capital to build a gpu cluster like that.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#39

Post by [deleted] »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

He'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…

[deleted]

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#40

Post by yreg »

echelon wrote: post #34
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

No. There can be tremendous value in AI, you just won't find it here. The reason is that Stability.ai gave away everything for free . Until recently, they didn't even attempt to charge money for their models. I've heard the only reason they're not already closed up is that they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota they leased out years ago. Companies are subletting from Stability, which locked in lots of long ter…

> the only reason they're not already closed up is that they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota

They have raised 110M in October and they say that training a particular model costs them hundreds of thousands $ in compute costs.

They don't lack money.

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