Will the outbreak of "infighting" and the sudden resignation of the CEO in Stability AI trigger a "butterfly effect" in the industry?
Stability AI创始人、CEO莫斯塔克（Emad Mostaque）
Stability AI, a star startup in the field of generative AI, broke out into "infighting" and encountered a crisis.
On March 23, Beijing time, Stability AI announced that the company's founder and CEO, Emad Mostaque, will no longer serve as the company's CEO and will resign as the company's chairman.
Stability AI said in a blog post that the move is backed by investors including Lightspeed Ventures and Coatue Management, and that there is no permanent replacement for the CEO yet, but that it has appointed Shanshan Huang, chief operating officer, and Christian Laforte, chief technology officer, as interim co-CEOs.
Subsequently, Mostak announced on the social platform X that he would devote himself to decentralized AI after leaving the company.
"My stake in Stability AI holds a majority of the voting rights in the company, which in turn controls the board of directors. The concentration of AI power is not good for everyone, so decide to quit for yourself. As AI becomes more important, Mostak explained, we should be more transparent and distributed in the governance of AI.
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in London, UK, Stability AI calls itself "the world's top open-source generative AI company" with an active community of more than 300,000 creators, developers, and researchers worldwide.
In August 2022, Stability AI released Stable Diffusion, an open-source Wensheng graph tool, which has been widely and rapidly disseminated, and has since entered the public eye. At the same time, this open-source technology has also facilitated the rapid development of companies such as Sora, Runway, Pika, and others.
According to CB Insights, Stability AI received a total of $151 million in the previous four rounds of funding, reaching a valuation of $1 billion in October 2022.
In fact, the company's CEO, Mostaq, is a controversial figure.
A native of British Bangladeshi descent, Mostak has held positions in corporate executives and former hedge fund managers. He claims to have bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Oxford. However, Mostak did not attend the graduation ceremony and received his degree, so strictly speaking, he did not have a bachelor's or master's degree.
During his tenure as CEO of Stability AI, Mostak has been accused of falsifying his academic qualifications and qualifications, and exaggerating his relationships with partners. The company he leads also has some problems. Mostak previously tweeted that his company was on track to make $3 million in November 2023 — a tweet that was later deleted.
There are also allegations that Stability AI struggled to pay its bills, including employee salaries. The media also reported reports that AWS (Amazon Web Services) threatened to refuse the company access to its services due to unpaid bills.
In March 2023, he signed an open letter calling for an "immediate moratorium on all AI labs to train AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months."
In June 2023, Forbes cited more than 30 sources, including investors and former Stability AI employees, as saying that Mostak had misled investors and the public about his educational background, partnership with Amazon AWS services, and the extent of his involvement in development.
Mostaq then refuted the allegations in a media article in a blog post, saying that "it is not surprising that the company has been targeted by the media as its influence has grown," and that he also accused Forbes of having "countless false accusations and distortions." At the same time, Mostak added, "Throughout my career, I have always been quick to praise and credit the work of my collaborators. I apologize for any mistakes I made and have always strived to keep improving. ”
On July 13, 2023, Stability AI co-founder Cyrus Hodes filed a civil lawsuit against Mostak, claiming that he was tricked into selling 15% of his company's shares for $100. In a funding round in October 2022, just five months after Hodder sold its stake, the stake was valued at $150 million. In his statement, Hodes claimed that he wanted to distance himself from Mostak after discovering a "pattern of defrauding investors and misappropriating investors and company assets for personal use" by his business partners.
Hoddes also claimed that "Mostak misappropriated Stability AI's funds to pay his family's rent in a luxury apartment in London" and that investors discovered that Mostak had misused investor funds to pay for his children's school fees in his previous venture. The cost of housing for Mostak's children and his London apartment.
On July 16, 2023, Mostak declared that AIGC "is a $1 trillion investment opportunity, but it will be 'the biggest bubble ever.'" ”
Just last week, Midjourney blocked all Stability AI employee information transmissions following alleged data theft. This week it was already reported that Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz, the three researchers who developed Stable Diffusion, left the company after a number of executives left, putting Stability AI in crisis.
据报道，此三人现在均已离开 Stability AI，而 Stability AI 也面临着现金流问题。
如今，雪上加霜的是，Stability AI在大西洋两岸都面临着 Getty Images 提起的诉讼，称 Stability 非法使用了其 1200 万张照片。
After the news was announced, some people joked that the current Stability AI is really not stable.
HuggingFace联合创始人、CEO Clement Delangue则直接表示：“事已至此，要不我们把 Stability 买下来，把 Stable Diffusion 3 给开源了？”
Some analysts believe that according to Mostak, he is similar to the ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year, which may trigger a "butterfly effect" in the industry - capital has the right to speak for leading companies in the AI field.
Steve Hoffman, the godfather of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and the founder of Founders Space, said on March 23 that in the field of AI, startups should not compete directly with large manufacturers, because it is too difficult to compete with large manufacturers.
"It's the right track that's the big deal, and if it's not an AI start-up, you won't be able to get any funding right now. A lot of businesses are dying. Hoffman said.
(This article was first published on the Titanium Media App, author: Lin Zhijia)