Stability AI is on shaky ground as it burns through cash and looks at a management overhaul | Semafor

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the unique position of Stability AI, a company that develops AI models, compared to its rivals like Google and the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Stability AI's Unique Positioning

1. How is Stability AI different from its rivals?

• Stability AI does not have a deep-pocketed partner that can absorb the expensive process of training AI models.
• Stable Diffusion, Stability AI's key product, was created by a collaborative effort involving academic researchers and other companies, not solely by Stability AI.

2. How did Stability AI support the development of Stable Diffusion?

• A few years ago, Mostaque (Stability AI's founder) approached the researchers working on early versions of Stable Diffusion and offered to fund their open-source AI models and PhD research.
• Mostaque also helped recruit other collaborators to bolster and speed up the development of Stable Diffusion.
• Mostaque personally financed the expensive compute power necessary to build the Stable Diffusion model, committing around $75 million to cover Amazon Web Services costs.

3. What challenges has Stability AI faced since the launch of Stable Diffusion?

• Stability AI has faced a wave of competition from rivals, such as Midjourney, which has emerged as the leader in image generation, surpassing OpenAI's DALL-E.
• Stability AI has developed updates to Stable Diffusion but has yet to publicly launch an AI model that it built from the ground up.
• Stability AI is working on a language model to compete with ChatGPT, but its release has been delayed, and it's unclear when it will be made public.

[02] Stability AI's Talent Acquisition

1. What key researchers has Stability AI recruited?

• Stability AI has recruited some of the top researchers in the field, including Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, and Robin Rombach.