Company Behind Stable Diffusion Is Crumbling
From fundraising more than $100 million to hemorrhaging top talent the firm that makes Stable Diffusion has had a heck of a year.
[ comments | sourced from HackerNews
This is the best summary I could come up with:
From fundraising more than $100 million at the end of 2022 to hemorrhaging top talent by mid-2023, Stability AI — the firm that funds and supports development of the open source Stable Diffusion image generator — has had a helluva year.
Though Mostaque insists that "churn" is a common practice in startups while trying to establish "cultural fit" between employee and company, interviews with several former and current people involved with the project say the CEO's lofty vision often doesn't match up to the reality of his day-to-day ability as a business leader.
Earlier this summer, Forbes published an exposé that highlighted his "history of exaggeration," and in its opening lines notes that Mostaque's claim that he has a master's degree from Oxford didn't hold up to scrutiny.
Case in point: in a statement to Futurism, a Stability representative said that because the company "is in the innovation business," it is "well aware that any time a new path is taken in any field, there will be critics and skeptics."
"That reality is no different for the field of generative AI, which has taken the world by storm because of its potential to be the greatest disruptor of our time," the statement continued.
We remain focused on developing the best open language and image models for millions of users worldwide, and our work is just beginning."
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
