The Company Behind Stable Diffusion Appears to Be Crumbling Into Chaos
From fundraising more than $100 million to hemorrhaging top talent the firm that makes Stable Diffusion has had a heck of a year.
Perhaps most salient is the suit filed last month by Stability AI cofounder Cyrus Hodes, who claimed the CEO convinced him to sell his 15 percent stake in the company for $100 after insisting that the company is "essentially worthless"
oof
Always remember...if someone tells you something is worthless, but they still want it, it ain't worthless...
How bad did he need $100!? That is essentially worthless in the context of any company, even a small business. I would imagine "essentially worthless" in a company is much closer to 100k
Yeah that seems really weird. $100 is so little money that you might as well hold onto it even if it were indeed worthless.
That would only make sense if there was something external forcing the sale or some kind of liability that you could escape through selling. And I can't see either applying here
Persuasion level 100
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!
Good bot
Emad is a lot like how I imagine Elon without the money.
The more I read, the more it seems Runway, not Stability, deserved to release what would eventually become Stable Diffusion.
All you need to know about him is he spends all his waking hours approaching different publications and asking them to interview him for his thoughts on AI. He is from the new batch of muskulencers.
Techbros gonna techbro. This barely counts as gossip. I wish them all a very accidentally trip in to the torment nexus where they suffer for a simulated eternity or something.
Seems to be just a hit piece. I only care if it does cool things and it's open source. None of the investor squabbling matter to me.
OK but I can still use it if the company goes down right?
Install it on your computer with automatic1111, then it's yours forever.
Beauty of FOSS
Hell yes.
From the tl;dr, it sounds like the CEO was a contestant on The Apprentice.
Sad to read. I hope they get their shit together. SD is the only option if you don't want to subscribe to any censored alternative.
Hopefully countries looking for data sovereignty but also want to use generative AI start looking to using them for this before the company dries up and proprietary AI running only in US data centers become the state of the art and defacto place to go.
I mean, how long has it taken for cloud offerings to start to catch up to AWS.
Corporate law is going to stop any of those guys from getting arrested for theft and that is a crying shame. I hate copyright as much as the next guy but these guys ain't it
So it found its magic!
Who are they and what do they do?
One of the most prominent generative AI tools that has been making headlines in the last few months. Stable Diffusion is specifically meant to create fully artificial, photo-realistic images. If you've ever seen one of those "all of these people don't exist" montages, it was almost certainly using images generated by this tool.
There's a ton of models and LoRa's for it that can create a pretty wide variety of things. I use it for creating on-the-fly watercolor scenes during D&D sessions for my session journal.
Company makes a tool that generates “ai” images. Mostly used by people that want to make porn that looks like real people but is not real people.
Which in a weird way is an ethical way to make porn with no "exploitation" involved with the process and there will always be a market for the "real" thing for the market. Now the AI art people can be incredibly thirsty but I do feel it is a bit reductive to say its mostly only for porn when the applications of it can be quite useful especially for hobbyists (who I feel aren't profiting solely on those creations). I see great use for generative "art" for tabletop in terms of character sheets/custom monsters/settings/ and even maps. AI art isn't necessarily a bad thing its just the fear of what large corporations will do with it that is really the scary part (also bullshit scammers who steal X artists work and try to resell it as that artist)
Well it's FOSS and other models/programs explicitly try to block porn. So of cause people make porn with SD
They ushered "AI" even before ChatGPT. It was "The" rad back in August 2022.
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