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

Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the unicorn startup’s top job and board, the buzzy company announced Friday evening, making it the second hot AI startup to undergo major changes this week.

Stability AI, backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, has no immediate everlasting successor as CEO, but has named its chief operating officer Shan Shan Wong and chief technology officer Christian Laforte as interim co-CEOs. – wrote within the blog post.

Stable AI, which has lost more than half a dozen key talents in recent quarters, said Mostaque was stepping right down to pursue decentralized AI. In a series of posts on X, Mostaque expressed his opinion that “centralized AI” can’t be beaten by more “centralized AI,” referring to the ownership structure of leading AI startups corresponding to OpenAI and Anthropic.

He moreover he stated that it was his decision to step down from the highest position because he had the most important variety of controlling stakes. “We should have more transparent and distributed management of artificial intelligence as it becomes more and more important. It’s (sic) a difficult problem, but I think we can solve it…” he added. “Concentration of power in artificial intelligence is bad for all of us. I have decided to step down to resolve this issue at Stability & Elsewhere.”

Mostaque’s departure from Stability AI, a startup known for its popular Stable Diffusion image generation tool, comes amid ongoing struggles on the startup that was spending an estimated 8 million dollars as of October 2023, based on Bloomberg, which also noted that the startup had unsuccessfully tried to boost $4 billion in latest funding.

It seems that a few 12 months ago, Mostaque wasn’t making revenue growth a priority. Last 12 months, in a post on X, he expressed amusement at “generative AI companies’ strange focus on revenue,” regardless that “the technology is useful but far from mature, with new breakthroughs happening almost daily.” He gave several examples, including MagicLeap, which spent billions before generating revenue.

“The benefits of proper research and development in generative AI are clearer and faster to market than anything we have seen. “It will create much greater economic value than, for example, autonomous cars, and the total investment in it was $100 billion and has not returned any revenue,” he wrote.

His comments last month, Reddit offered insight into the shift in focus. “We are already doing well this year and ahead of forecasts. Our goal this year is positive cash flow and I think we will achieve this sooner rather than later,” he wrote.

“The market is huge and open models will be needed for edge sectors and all regulated industries. That’s why we are one of the few companies that provide data, code, training details and more. Custom models, consulting and more are huge markets and very sensible business models around this as we move into enterprise adoption over the next year, last year it was just testing.”

The announcement of Stability AI 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 a number of other other employees have joined Microsoft, which led the startup’s latest round of funding.