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On September 7, for example, for Forbes, Stability AI, a company that does artificial intelligence painting, is negotiating a new round of funding to hit a $1 billion valuation.
From an investment perspective, $1 billion is a watershed moment, and beyond that line it's called a "unicorn." There were just over 200 unicorns worldwide in 2017; By February 2022, there were more than 1,000 unicorn companies worldwide. These extremely scarce technology companies with their own technical barriers have become the objects of capital pursuit.
If there are no accidents in this negotiation, the first unicorn of AI painting will appear, opening up a new artificial intelligence track.
We previously introduced THE EARLIEST DAL-E, WHICH LED THIS WAVE OF AI PAINTING, FROM OPENAI; and Midjourney, who used to draw illustrations in magazines; There's also Google's painting platform, Imagen, which is not yet available to the public; And this Stability AI created the painting platform Stable Diffusion, which already has a considerable user base.
Founder and CEO Emad Mostaque is only 39 years old, from Bangladesh and grew up in the UK. He earned a master's degree in mathematics and computer science from Oxford University in 2005 and worked for 13 years at a uk-based hedge fund company after graduation.
An investor with a computer background is better at capturing market opportunities in IT technology, and it is inevitable to see the outbreak of the wave of artificial intelligence in recent years. Mostaq started his business in 2019 as a SaaS company with identity authentication, and this venture did not go well, making a comeback at the end of 2020 and founding stability AI.
If there is any difference between these AI painting platforms, from the experience of my colleagues, it is mainly the degree of freedom that can be played. Although Midjourney can achieve a very rich painting to meet the basic needs of magazine covers and illustrations, Stable Diffusion can set more parameters for adjustment, and can achieve richer details and colors of images, with higher diversity.
This is because in terms of data limitations, Stable Diffusion is more open, on the one hand, a lot of the underlying code is open source, which allows developers with certain programming capabilities to bypass restrictions and implement functions that are difficult to achieve on other platforms; On the other hand, there is a lower degree of regulation, such as celebrities and sensitive images that are banned on other platforms, which can also be used here. So Stable Diffusion is also the most controversial AI painting platform.
Whether the underlying tools of AI should be open sourced is a very divergent topic. When OpenAI was acquired by Microsoft for $1 billion, Musk also expressed his dissatisfaction, believing that it deviated from the original intention of co-founding OpenAI "free and open", and many previous open source tools have now become fee-based, becoming a business with the goal of commercial profitability.
This time, Stable Diffusion is more like returning to the original intention of OpenAI, developers can completely download the underlying code of AI painting for free to train their own models. But of course, it is not pure public welfare, otherwise how can the company make money? Users still have to pay as much as they want when using AI painting services, such as 10 euros to buy 1000 virtual coins, and it takes an average of 5 to 10 virtual coins to generate a large high-definition map.
Not only is the technology open source controversial, but there is no unified consensus on the business model. As mentioned earlier, Stable Diffusion makes money on pay-as-you-go, while Midjourney directly adopts a subscription system. Since in the early stages, neither company was profitable. Similar to the Internet bubble period of that year, when the prospects of technology are not clear enough, let the business run first, the number of users first, and the business model can be slowly explored later.
Given the technology controversy and unclear business model, is this startup worth $1 billion?
According to Forbes, during the initial negotiations, the technology venture capital fund Coatue set the valuation of Stability AI at $500 million, and then another VC Lightspeed came in and directly raised the valuation to 1 billion.
The reason for the direct doubling is said to be that CEO Mostaq told a heartwarming future story. His ideal is to make an AI open source platform, the future of AI applications is not only text to picture, including AI audio and video, AI animation production tools and so on will be launched one after another, so the potential is great.
The market also affirmed this technology, many commercial institutions, large enterprises have come to buy this AI painting technology, Stability AI CEO is very confident to promise investors, the company will soon be profitable.
From our observation, AI painting is really possible to achieve large-scale commercial applications. Not long ago we shared an example of replacing external procurement with AI painting in The Atlantic, and although there are many painters who express their dissatisfaction with the replacement of their professions, this is a trend that is bound to happen.
Because AI works are not only low cost, richer effects, but also arbitrary, how to draw how you want, why use traditional human outsourcing? You know, the more senior the painter, the more expensive the price, the longer it takes, if Party A is not satisfied, it will repeatedly toss the designer, further reducing the efficiency.
The traditional media illustration business is an existing market that already has a certain scale, and AI painting has a great advantage in cutting into this market and replacing traditional illustrators, so this market can become the first low-hanging fruit of AI painting enterprises, bringing actual revenue profits to enterprises and supporting further exploration of enterprises.
And these initial applications have also opened up more imagination, Stability AI mentioned that it is already developing the use of AI for short videos and cartoons, which can understand why companies that do not even have a clear business model will have a higher valuation.
However, it should be noted that in the future, AI painting will definitely become a basic tool that everyone can use, so today these AI painting companies can not continue to make a lot of money, and it remains to be seen whether they can maintain such a high valuation. Before it truly becomes a basic tool for free to use, whether it can launch new applications and have more novel ways to play, so as to build higher barriers, is a big test for these AI startups. If it is only a simple application of AI painting, the biggest possibility is to be acquired by a large cloud platform, and then as a basic function, it is cheap or even free to provide its own users.
However, in any case, the rise of AI painting and the exploration of commercialization show that this round of digital technology represented by artificial intelligence has entered a period of expansion, which will create colorful applications in various walks of life. And the drivers of these applications will be early adopters like Lastak, CEO of Stability AI, that is, ordinary people like each of us, but they will embrace the new technology earlier and find the right way to use it. Therefore, this round of opportunities in the technology industry belongs to each of us who love science and technology ordinary people.
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