Is this the end for Stability AI?

Stability AI Deep Dive and latest C-suite shuffling. Let's break this down. 🧮

Hey Everyone,

Stability AI was an early pioneer, like Inflection AI, whose future is now in serious doubt. Stability is best known for Stable Diffusion, a popular image generation tool that helped kick off tech’s current AI frenzy and a developer fascination with open-source LLMs.

• Now in early 2024, three out of the five researchers who originally created the technology behind Stable Diffusion have left the company recently.

• The former of CEO of Stability AI has stepped down in a cryptic tweet, a few hours after Forbes had reported the news.

A lot has happend around Stability AI recently. I asked

Tobias Mark Jensen

of

Futuristic Lawyer

to do a deep dive on the company. However, in the last few a lot of additional events have taken place. So let’s try to unpack all of this.

For me this is very much an obituary or eulogy for an AI startup I was so very excited about back in 2022. What does that suggest about the Generative AI movement? It’s time for some serious questioning and soul-searching.

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The Open-Source LLM movement continues Sans Stability AI

Stability AI like we said last time we covered it just last week, was one of the key early proponents of the open-source LLM movement. The exodus of even more core talent from Stability AI, raises a lot of questions. Forbes has reported on a lot of the more controversial aspects of the CEO’s conduct.

Stability AI always gave mixed signals.

Emad Mostaque has been an eclectic character to say the least, but also a little bit off the rails (see some of his YouTube podcasts to get the gist of what I mean). Stability AI’s own announcement over the changes, doesn’t tell the full story. A little bit of short to midterm history:

• Stability AI has been one of the the UK’s most promising Generative AI startups for the last few years.

• The company's board has now (late March, 2024) appointed chief operating officer Shan Shan Wong and chief technology officer Christian Laforte as interim co-CEOs.

• Stability had explored selling itself as investors pressured management over its financial position.

• Stability also saw significant high-level turnover in the last 18 months including the key person/people who help OpenAI developed ‘Sora’.

• Mostaque, a larger-than-life presence in the AI world, co-founded the startup in 2019 after various roles at hedge funds and crypto projects. His conduct has been under some serious scrutiny including a lawsuit from a former (Cyrus Hodes) cofounder.

• Tensions escalated last year between Stability AI and some of its largest investors, rising to a point where Coatue Management (via Bloomberg) called for Mostaque to step down in a letter to management. Emad “resigning” has only occurred several painful months later.

Emad’s X profile has gone into stealth mode recently I have noticed.

He has been talking about decentralized AI now, in line with the ideology around his former crypto activities. His work with Peter Diamandis on his podcast Moonshots is in particular, striking to me: (some of the quotes are pretty wild)

Of course the claims suggested that Generative AI is an exponential technology. He also said some pretty wacky things to generate hype for the movement, which in retrospect or in history might sound a bit inflated. That’s always a red flag to me, when CEOs exaggerate. Sam Altman does a similar thing with a serial playbook.

That being said, Stability AI has made a gigantic contribution to the space. And it may now be on “life-support” much like Inflection AI is just a shell of its former self. For example, it may have to sell itself to Hugging Face. Why so much consolidation in the Generative AI space just two years in?

To understand all of this better, let’s go to the guest post by

Tobias Mark Jensen

. Tobias is my favorite lawyer who writes about AI, ethics and AI governance among other things.

Thanks for your contributions Emad Mostaque, one of the most colorful early founders of the Generative AI open-source movement.

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By

Tobias Mark Jensen

, March, 2024.

Stability AI Deep Dive