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Tag: Emad Mostaque

  • Stability AI CEO resigns because you can’t beat centralized AI with more centralized AI | TechCrunch

    Stability AI CEO resigns because you can’t beat centralized AI with more centralized AI | TechCrunch

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    Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the top role and the unicorn startup‘s board, the buzzy firm said Friday night, making it the second hot AI startup to go through major changes this week.

    Stability AI, which has been backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, doesn’t have an immediate permanent replacement for the CEO role but has appointed its COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as interim co-CEOs, it said in a blog post.

    Stability AI, which has lost more than half a dozen key talent in recent quarters, said Mostaque is stepping down to pursue decentralized AI. In a series of posts on X, Mostaque opined that one can’t beat “centralized AI” with more “centralized AI,” referring to the ownership structure of top AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

    He additionally asserted that it was his decision to step down from the top role as he held the most number of controlling shares. “We should have more transparent & distributed governance in AI as it becomes more and more important. Its [sic] a hard problem, but I think we can fix it..,” he added. “The concentration of power in AI is bad for us all. I decided to step down to fix this at Stability & elsewhere.”

    Mostaque’s departure from Stability AI, a startup known for its popular image generation tool Stable Diffusion, comes amid an ongoing struggle at the startup that was spending a reported estimate of $8 million a month as of October 2023, according to Bloomberg, which also noted that the startup had unsuccessfully attempted to raise new funding at a $4 billion valuation.

    Mostaque, it appears, wasn’t prioritizing revenue growth about a year ago. In a post on X last year, he expressed his amusement at the generative AI companies’ “strange focus on revenue” even as “the technology is useful but far from vaguely mature as new breakthroughs happen almost daily.” He cited several examples, including MagicLeap, which spent billions before generating revenue.

    “The payoffs on proper generative AI R&D are clearer and faster to market than just about anything we’ve seen. It’s going to create way more economic value than self driving cars for example, the total investment in that has been $100b with no revenue pay off,” he wrote.

    His comments on Reddit last month offered insights into a shift in focus. “We are doing fine and ahead of forecasts this year already. Our aim is to be cash flow positive this year, think we could get there sooner rather than later,” he wrote.

    “The market is huge and open models will be needed for edge and all regulated industries. This is why we are one of the only companies to open data, code, training run details and more. Custom models, consulting and more are huge markets and very reasonable business models around this as we enter enterprise adoption over the next year or so, last year was just testing.”

    Stability AI’s announcement caps a remarkable week for the AI industry. Inflection AI, a startup that had raised about $1.5 billion, announced on Monday that two of its co-founders as well as several other staff had joined Microsoft, which led the startup’s most recent funding round.

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    Manish Singh

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  • A.I. ‘controls humanity’ in the worst-case scenario but will probably just find us boring, says Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque

    A.I. ‘controls humanity’ in the worst-case scenario but will probably just find us boring, says Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque

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    Emad Mostaque hopes A.I. will find us “a bit boring” but acknowledges that in the worst-case scenario it “basically controls humanity.” 

    Mostaque is CEO of the fast-growing London-based startup Stability AI, which popularized Stable Diffusion. That’s a generative A.I. tool allowing users to create often remarkably sophisticated images using nothing but text prompts. He made the comments in a BBC interview released this weekend.

    “If you have a more capable thing than you, what is democracy in that kind of environment? This is a known unknown,” he told the British broadcaster. “Because we can’t conceive of something more capable than us, but we all know people more capable than us. So, my personal belief is it will be like that movie Her with Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix: Humans are a bit boring, and it’ll be like, ‘Goodbye’ and ‘You’re kind of boring.’”

    “But I could be wrong,” he added. “I think it deserves to be discussed in a public sphere.” 

    In March, Mostaque joined Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak in signing an open letter calling for pause in A.I. development for anything more advanced than GPT-4, the A.I. chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which also makes ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 (the latter, like Stable Diffusion, converts text prompts to images). 

    “If we have agents that are more capable than us that we cannot control that are going across the internet and [are] hooked up and they achieve a level of automation,” he told the BBC, “what does that mean?”

    Stability AI is racing ahead, however, in developing new products—including a text-to-animation tool released this week—and wooing investors. It’s seeking to raise funds at a $4 billion valuation, following a $1 billion valuation last October after raising about $100 million. (Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners are among its investors.)

    At the same time, Stability AI is being sued by Getty Images in a landmark case over copyright. Such a lawsuit was perhaps inevitable given that text-to-image A.I. models like Stable Diffusion are trained using billions of images pulled from the internet.

    Asked by the BBC what the worst-case scenario might be, Mostaque said: “Worst-case scenario is that it proliferates and basically it controls humanity. Because you could have a million of these things replicating effectively.” 

    Unusually, Stable Diffusion is open source, meaning anyone can examine the code, share it, and use it. 

    In March, Musk, who cofounded and helped fund OpenAI, criticized it for switching away from a nonprofit model, taking hefty investments from Microsoft, and not being open source. He tweeted:

    “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it ‘Open’ AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.”

    “I think there shouldn’t have to be a need for trust,” Mostaque told the BBC. “If you build open models and you do it in the open, you should be criticized if you do things wrong and hopefully lauded if you do some things right.”

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    Steve Mollman

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