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Image credits: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaq has stepped down from his top role and the unicorn startup’s board of directors, the high-profile company announced Friday night, the second major shake-up this week. It has become a popular AI startup.
Stability AI, which is backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, does not have an immediate permanent replacement for the CEO role, but has appointed COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as interim co-founders. He was appointed CEO, the magazine said. Blog post.
StabilityAI, which has lost more than six key employees in recent quarters, said Mostak was leaving to pursue decentralized AI. In a series of posts about X, Mostaque gave an opinion Pointing to the ownership structure of top AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic, he says that you can’t beat “centralized AI” by making “centralized AI” even stronger.
He further claimed It was said that it was his decision to step down from the top position as he held the largest number of controlling shares. “As AI becomes increasingly important, we need more transparent and decentralized governance in AI. [sic] It’s a difficult problem, but I think it can be solved…” he added. “The concentration of power in AI is bad for all of us. I have decided to step down to solve this problem in Stability and other departments.”
Mostaque’s exit from Stability AI, a startup known for its popular image generation tool Stable Diffusion, comes at a time when the startup was spending an estimated $8 million a month as of October 2023, according to Bloomberg. The move comes amid the ongoing struggles of the US, Bloomberg reports. The startup unsuccessfully attempted to raise new funding at a valuation of $4 billion.
Mostaque appears to have not prioritized increasing revenue about a year ago. In a post for X last year, he wrote that generative AI companies’ “revenue-focused He expressed his amusement at “his strange posture.” He cited several examples, including MagicLeap, which spent billions of dollars before generating any revenue.
“The results of good generative AI research and development will be clearer and faster to market than anything we have seen to date. , whose total investment was $100 billion, with no return whatsoever,” he wrote.
His comments on Reddit last month provided insight into the shift in focus. “This year is already on track to exceed expectations. Our goal is to be cash flow positive this year, and we think we’ll get there sooner than later,” he wrote.
“The market is huge and requires an open model for edge industries and all regulated industries. This is why we are one of the only companies to open up our data, code, training execution details, etc. . Custom models, consulting, etc. is a huge market and it’s a very logical business model for this because it’s going to start rolling into enterprises over the next year or so, but last year was just a test.”
The Stability AI announcement caps off a remarkable week for the AI industry. Inflection AI, a startup that has raised about $1.5 billion, announced Monday that two of its co-founders and several other staff members have joined Microsoft, which led the startup’s latest round of funding.
