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

351–360 of 429 posts

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#351

Post by monero-xmr »

alephnerd wrote: post #339
JCM9 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. My reference in business questioning value was on the flood of money going into building new models. That’s where we will see a significant and painful culling soon as it’s all becoming quite commoditized and there’s only so much room in the market when that happens. Tooling, security services and other things to build on top of a commoditized generative AI market opens up other doors for products t…

> flood of money going into building new models In my experience, there really hasn't been that significant of a flood of money in this space for several years now, or at least not to the level I've seen based on discussion here on HN. I think HN tends to skew towards conversations around models for some reason, but almost all my peers are either funding or working on either tooling or ML driven applications since 20…

I’ve been in crypto since 2010 and HN hasn’t predicted anything. At least with AI the congnoscenti here is on board. With crypto / blockchain the current plan is to pretend it doesn’t exist and never speak of it, as the industry never imploded as was long predicted.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#352

Post by Der_Einzige »

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'…

What's insane to me is the fact that the best interfaces to utilize any of these models, from open source LLMs to open source diffusion models, are still random gradio webUIs made by the 4chan/discord anime profile picture crowd.

Automatic1111, ComfyUI, Oobabooga. There's more value within these 3 projects than within at least 1 billion dollars worth of money thrown around on yet another podunk VC backed firm with no product.

It appears that no one is even trying to seriously compete with them on the two primary things that they excel at - 1. Developer/prosumer focus and 2. extension ecosystem.

Also, if you're a VC/Angel reading my comments about this, I would very much love to talk to you.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#353

Post by pama »

alephnerd wrote: post #339
JCM9 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. My reference in business questioning value was on the flood of money going into building new models. That’s where we will see a significant and painful culling soon as it’s all becoming quite commoditized and there’s only so much room in the market when that happens. Tooling, security services and other things to build on top of a commoditized generative AI market opens up other doors for products t…

> flood of money going into building new models In my experience, there really hasn't been that significant of a flood of money in this space for several years now, or at least not to the level I've seen based on discussion here on HN. I think HN tends to skew towards conversations around models for some reason, but almost all my peers are either funding or working on either tooling or ML driven applications since 20…

I agree that the quality of the posts has decayed dramatically since the start of the COVID pandemic and lots of the Reddit type memes and upvotes have added horrible levels of noise. I can still find gems in it and it’s still miles ahead of Twitter, but I do question my time using it passively and would much rather have a smaller and more focused community again.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#354

Post by anon7725 »

JCM9 wrote: post #330
ASinclair wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Business minded folks are already starting to deeply question where the value is relative to the amount of money spent on training. Not just training but inference too, right? They have to make money off each query.

Yes. Each query needs to generate enough revenue to pay for the cost of running the query, a proportional cost of the cost to train the original model, overhead, SG&A, etc. just to break even. Few have shown a plan to do that or explained in a defensible way how they’re going to get there. A challenge at the moment is a lot of the AI movement is led by folks that are brilliant technologists but have little to no expe…

> the whole AI space will implode if it’s not a viable business

if the Good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#355

Post by samatman »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #316
huytersd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI and midjourney have millions of paying customers.

Yeah, but not sure if OpenAI is profitable yet (they lost $500M last year), and costs are rising, and competition increasing. GPT-4 cost $100M+ to train (Altman), but Dario Amodei has said next-gen models may cost $1B to train, and $10B models are not inconceivable. I'd guess OpenAI's payroll is probably $0.5B (770 highly paid employees + benefits, not to mention hundreds of contractors creating data sets).

It would be negligent for them to aim for profitability right now.

They're doing what they should: growing the customer base while continuing to work on the next generation of the core technology, and developing the support code to apply what they have to as broad a cross-section of problems as they have the potential to offer a solution for.

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#357

Post by jart »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #94
callalex wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have, there are a bunch of bottom of the barrel executives that have done hiring freezes and layoffs under the assumption that AI would replace everything. It will go the exact same way as the outsourcing craze that swept the industry in the mid aughts. The executives that initiate the savings will be praised and rewarded lavishly, and then when everything blows up and falls apart those responsible for the short s…

Are there any good numbers on how many positions this has affected?

https://layoffs.fyi/

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#358

Post by ben_w »

numpad0 wrote: post #305
ben_w wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people mix up all the different kinds of intellectual property basically all the time[0], so while people say it's about copyright, I (currently) think it's more likely to be a mixture of "moral rights" (the right to be named as the creator of a work) and trademarks (registered or otherwise), and in the case of celebrities, "personality rights": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights > It's just not th…

> Der Kuss (by Klimt) is widely regarded as being good art, The point is, generative AI images are not widely regarded as good art. They're often seen as passable for some filler use cases and hard to tell apart from human generations, but not "good". It's not not-there-yet because AI sometimes generates sixth fingers, it's something another level from Gustav Klimt, Damien Hirst, Kusama Yayoi, or the likes[0]. It cou…

> The point is, generative AI images are not widely regarded as good art. They're often seen as passable for some filler use cases and hard to tell apart from human generations, but not "good".

> It's not not-there-yet because AI sometimes generates sixth fingers, it's something another level from Gustav Klimt

My point is: yes AI is different — it's better. (Or, less provocatively: better by my specific standards).

Always? No. But I chose Der Kuss specifically because of the high regard in which it is held, and yet to my eye it messes with anatomy as badly as if he had put 6 fingers on one of the hands (indeed, my first impression when I look closely at the hand of the man behind the head of the woman, is that the fingers art too long and thumb looks like a finger).

Re: Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

#359

Post by n2d4 »

zenlikethat wrote: post #101
ImprobableTruth wrote: post #21

Really 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.

Translation of “stepping down to focus on distributed AI”: Getting fired and making moves to capitalize on the current crypto boom while it lasts

Getting fired by whom? He is both the majority shareholder and controls the board
Post reply on HN