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This dude very well may be better off with the 100 bucks at this point. The company is bleeding money at a ridiculous rate, so they're going to need to fundrai
by ansk 3y ago
This dude very well may be better off with the 100 bucks at this point. The company is bleeding money at a ridiculous rate, so they're going to need to fundraise shortly. Given how little they have to show for their initial funding, they're going to struggle to attract any further investments. The initial investors already look like absolute clowns for giving a $1B valuation to a company whose primary selling points were 1) a model which was state-of-the-art for maybe a month 2) a github repo with a lot of stars and 3) a loose association to some mediocre researchers. Unless they can find someone to hold the bag in the very near future, their equity is going to be just about worthless.
- ivalm 3y agoThe loose association was with decent researchers, no need to bring them down. I do agree about the rest.
- ansk 3y agoMediocre in regard to the standard set by other research teams pulling $1B+ valuations. The OpenAI founding team and the recently announced team at xAI are what I would consider to be exceptionally strong groups. Adept, Anthropic, Inflection, and character.ai are also strong. Look at the track records and accolades of researchers at these groups. Ilya Sutskever alone has more research experience than the combined team of phd students Emad was working with (and eventually hired).
- anonylizard 3y agoWow, the AI field has barely boomed for like 1 year, and we are already all-in on credentialism? Stable Diffusion has had a very large impact on the entire arts industry, far more people have used SD than have Claude or pi. If another open source startup can reach that level of industry shaking fame and intense user interest, they could have easily be valued at 1B. If SDXL works out, that'll be another large leap forward. Midjourney's models are stronger, but they can't compete against a legion of 1000 fine-tunes for every purpose.
- Filligree 3y agoYeah. I still don't see how this will work for _Stability_, but the impact is definitely there.
- ShamelessC 3y agoThe researchers responsible for latent diffusion and VQGAN have competed directly with OpenAI for at least 2 years. They are at the top of their field.
- Filligree 3y agoLet's be nice; they've released Stable Diffusion and now SDXL for free, which has completely changed the landscape on what can practically be done by individuals. Having an open foundation model for image-generation is a service to the world. It just isn't exactly obvious how it could possibly lead to profit.
- __loam 3y ago[flagged]
- cthalupa 3y agoWe really have no idea how the case law is going to fall out on whether or not it is legal to train on copyrighted content. There is precedent in the US that lends itself to the idea that this would be considered fair use, such as Google Books. In the UK, when this was all happening, the UK government was in the middle of saying they planned to change copyright laws to explicitly allow it. ( https://www.allenovery.com/en-gb/global/blogs/digital-hub/proposed-changes-to-copyright-law-to-facilitate-data-mining https://www.allenovery.com/en-gb/global/blogs/digital-hub/pr... ) Other countries, like Japan, explicitly allow training on copyrighted content for AI and machine learning - Article 30-4 of the Japan's Copyright Law. As it stands, there are very few places where the law here is settled, and StabilityAI is, to my knowledge, not in any of those places. So it's probably not reasonable at this point to be so definitive in claiming that copyrighted content was stolen - it very well end up that the letter of the law ends up supporting this as explicitly legal. Or maybe not! We'll see.
- __loam 3y agoI don't think the Google books case is a good analog here because the image model stuff runs counter to a few of the things that might make something fair use, particularly the point about affecting the market for the original work. And even if it does turn out to be legal, you're still a piece of shit if you take an artist's work and train on it without their permission.
- skeaker 3y agoMaybe this is callous, but this kind of sounds like a win win. Investors who are responsible for enshittifying all my favorite stuff finally get screwed for once, AI gets democratized instead of being solely in the hands of OpenAI/Google/etc in the process. Nice.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoThe dude might well be better off in the near future when the hype passes and company is worth its fair price of $50.