The boss of Stable Diffusion also ran away! Core R&D has collectively resigned, and "stable AI" has become a mess.

Mingmin Fengse comes from Ao Fei Temple
Qubit | Official account QbitAI

Suddenly!

Just today, the CEO of Stability AI announced his resignation.

Emad Mostaque , who no longer serves as CEO, has also stepped down from the company's board of directors.

As soon as the news came out, everyone was extremely shocked.

Stability AI is no longer stable.

It is reported that Chief Operating Officer Shan Shan Wong and Chief Technology Officer Christian Laforte will serve as interim CEOs.

Earlier, Stable’s core R&D team resigned collectively.

ps. The current CTO has just been appointed, and former CTO Tom Mason’s LinkedIn has not yet been updated.

What happened to this most popular AI unicorn?

The CEO is going to open up AI

In addition to announcing the resignation of the CEO, the announcement also stated that a long-term CEO will be recruited to lead the company into the next stage of growth.

The next stop of the former CEO is not clear. He said that he will devote himself to the openness and decentralization of AI.

In the announcement, he said that he was very proud that since the introduction of the first developer, Stability has received hundreds of millions of downloads and created the best model across modalities.

I firmly believe in the mission of Stability AI and believe that the company should be in capable hands.

The chairman of the board of directors of Stability AI also recognized Emad’s work:

Many thanks to Emad for his leadership and commitment to Stability AI and open source efforts.

However, behind the "peaceful breakup", the turmoil at the top of Stability AI goes beyond that.

According to statistics, at least 19 senior executives or key figures have left the company since March last year . The CTO has also just been replaced. It is said that with the new CTO taking office, the company's strategy may shift towards language models.

There is news that Emad’s resignation is related to the resignation of the core team and conflicts with investors.

Bloomberg reports that Stability AI is considering selling the company as investors put pressure on management over the company's financial condition .

The company was in early-stage talks with several companies about acquisitions last fall. And the company's senior leadership was also very turbulent last year.

It is worth mentioning that during his tenure, Emad was exposed to a lot of black material, including:

Falsifying academic qualifications/work experience, arrears of wages to employees, defrauding investors, misappropriation of public funds, etc.

And the people who broke the news were former employees. If investors are included, a total of more than 30 people made accusations.

Cyrus Hodes, co-founder of Stability AI, even sued Emad specifically for "fraud and embezzlement . "

But we don't know whether Emad's resignation is related to this.

But what is certain is that behind this "peaceful breakup", the turmoil of Stability AI has become apparent.

Just two days ago, former CEO Emad Mostaque personally announced at an internal all-hands meeting:

Stable Diffusion core research team resigned collectively.

Including Robin Rombach, the leader of the research team and the first author of the paper, Andreas Blattmann, the co-first author, and Dominik Lorenz, the other author.

What happened to Stability AI?

Much of Stability AI's success can be directly attributed to Stable Diffusion.

As mentioned earlier, Stable Diffusion started as an academic research project.

Led by Professor Björn Ommer, Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz, three members of the machine vision and learning research group of the University of Munich, and researchers from Runway were completed.

Seven months after the research paper was published, Stability AI stepped in to provide computing resources to further develop the text-to-image generation model.

Just one month after its official release, Stable Diffusion became popular inside and outside the industry, prompting Stability AI to raise US$101 million in Series A financing in 2022, and its valuation quickly climbed to US$1 billion.

It is worth mentioning that Stable Diffusion is popular not only because of its effects, but also because it is free and open source .

However, precisely because Stable Diffusion is open enough, the business model of Stability AI is not clear. In other words, you cannot make money stably.

According to previous reports from Bloomberg, the company spends at least US$8 million (approximately RMB 57 million) every month to support business operations.

"Forbes" pointed out directly: Internal documents show that StabilityAI's expenses greatly exceeded its revenue.

At the end of last year, there was news that Stability AI was seeking a sale due to financial pressure.

According to Business Insider, CEO Emad Mostaque once warned Stability AI employees that the industry is highly competitive:

You will all die in 2023.

The core team suddenly resigned a few days ago, and Forbes also revealed the reason:

Stability Al is struggling to make ends meet and cannot raise new capital.

Netizens are also worried about this. Can Stable Diffusion 3, which has not yet been fully opened, still be open source?

It is worth mentioning that Stability AI is not the only AI startup currently facing commercialization difficulties.

Inflection AI, valued at $4 billion, is also facing disintegration.

Its CEO (DeepMind co-creator Mustafa Suleiman) and chief scientist have both gone to Microsoft to lead the newly established AI department at Microsoft, and have taken a large number of employees from Inflection AI with them.

You know, Microsoft is an investor in Inflection AI. As long as people don't want the company, a large part of the reason should come from the current predicament that Inflection AI is encountering.

Since its establishment, Inflection AI's large models have been iterated to the 2.5th generation, and the AI ​​product PI, which focuses on personal companionship, has been launched.

But in the past three months, the average number of monthly visits to the Pi website has been less than 4 million. This means that Pi is at least outside the 50th position in global AI product traffic rankings.

And in terms of commercialization, Inflection AI has not made significant progress.

Nowadays, Stability AI, the top player in image generation, is also facing a dilemma...

Under the wave of large models, how to promote commercialization? is testing all startups.

The battle royale has begun.

Reference link:
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/03/20/key-stable-diffusion-researchers-leave-stability-ai-as-company-flounders/
[2] https ://www.techmeme.com/240320/p29#a240320p29

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