9 ms·

The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be crumbling into chaos

124 points by josephjrobison 3y ago

syrusakbary 3y ago
What is this article really about? So many details missing about the $70k bill to assume is the wrongdoing of the CEO or company. The article smells like someone wants to build an argument against Stable Diffusion. I don't think that any of the arguments on the article hold to imply that Stable Diffusion (company) is crumbling. As an example, the "I sold 15% of the stake for $100" argument from the previous cofounder doesn't hold unless proven otherwise by a judge. The context always matter: is not the same selling 15% when there were no investors or IP, to selling it under coercion... but that a judge will be way better to assess than people external to the matter. I wonder what's the gain behind publishing this kind of "yellow" articles (and to whom)
- dontknowmuch 3y ago
  Looks like a hit piece planted to build momentum to oust the CEO.
- formvoltron 3y ago
  why would anyone bother to sell for $100? I mean just get a job as a UPS driver!
  - NegativeK 3y ago
    I've got some incredibly worthless stuff that I'd take $100 for.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Is any of it a substantial stake in an operating generative-AI company? If so, I'll buy it for $100; I literally don't intend to do more diligence than that to find a likely overlay.
      - emadm 3y ago
        He wanted out completely and no association after first project failed https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1680774535342358528?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1680774535342358528?s=4...
        sokoloff 3y ago
        According to the account of someone who has a substantial vested interest in that being the case. (It might be the case, in which "they got what they asked for".) In a case where each side has a substantial vested interest in their story being accepted as true, it's wise to be skeptical of the claims on both sides and look for other, corroborating or contradicting evidence.
        emadm 3y ago
        It's pretty clear cut as his suit has three claims 1. Did not inform him of pivot and generative AI art (false, even generated AI art for him) 2. Did not inform him of fundraise/inflows (also false) 3. Either of the above are not legal under Delaware law (also false) We will find out in a few months I suppose.
  - defen 3y ago
    It's possible that he perceived his ownership stake as having negative value - e.g. due to tax reasons or other regulatory overhead (needing to participate in board meetings or whatever), legal risk (they get sued for doing something desperate and dumb and he needs to participate in the lawsuit) etc. But you can't just dissolve your shares, you have to either shut the company down entirely or sell your stake to someone. If he thought the company was truly worthless / negative expected value then $100 is fair consideration. A famous example of this is Ronald Wayne selling his 10% stake in Apple for $800 because he was worried that Jobs would incur a bunch of risky debt that he'd be liable for.
    - chii 3y ago
      i would've imagined that a limited liability corporation means that the lowest value it can go is zero, not negative. A shareholder cannot and should not ever be responsible for the debts of the company imho. As for time costs, the shareholder could just not attend or do anything, if they perceive the work to be of worthless value, and thus, should therefore have zero as the floor, rather than negative!
  - esperent 3y ago
    In case anyone is out of the loop here, UPS drivers have a strong union and negotiated a great rate of pay. The story being spun in the media is that us tech workers are angry about this for some reason. It's one of the most blatant attempts to pit workers against workers and undermine unions that I've ever seen.
- mikhmha 3y ago
  Really? I think the untrustworthiness of the CEO and their tendency to embellish facts around their background is a massive red flag. These have been reported on multiple times the past few months. Why lie about having a masters degree or working at a trading firm? And of course you may say that all CEOs are liars. And I would agree. But the smart CEO’s know not to lie about trivial things like education credentials. I don’t think this is a hit piece. I think the incompetency of the CEO is finally bubbling up to the surface and rotting the company from the inside. And now the original believers are starting to turn on their former saviour.
  - cma 3y ago
    > Why lie about having a masters degree or working at a trading firm? Maybe not really having the degree but it mostly being satisfied is a positive with venture capitalist after the richest man in the world had problems with his physics degree.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - emadm 3y ago
      It was a weird allegation when I paid the postage and got the MA from Oxford a couple of weeks later https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1682091613278072832?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1682091613278072832?s=4... Told them that and more https://emad.posthaven.com/on-setting-the-record-straight https://emad.posthaven.com/on-setting-the-record-straight On the cofounder share sale thing it was the Ron Wayne effect with massive sour grapes and him straight up lying https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1680774535342358528?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1680774535342358528?s=4...
      - ilaksh 3y ago
        Can you detail the years of study after your completion of the BA that enabled you to be awarded the MA? Or is this a "free" MA indicating "seniority"? If it's the latter, then that's deliberately misleading to keep referencing it as if it were a normal MA. I do appreciate your efforts with the open source models though.
- anonylizard 3y ago
  There is 100% a hit piece effort against stability. It is extremely unusual, for multiple media outlets to repeatedly write an article against a small startup, that's completely unrelated to customer harm or say employee abuse. Wow, the founder fudged his VC presentations, wow, the masters degree wasn't legit, like WHO CARES? The only missing piece was the motivation, who exactly holds such a grudge against Emad really? Then the missing piece finally came to light: https://www.reuters.com/technology/stability-ai-is-sued-by-co-founder-who-says-he-was-duped-selling-stake-100-2023-07-13/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/stability-ai-is-sued-by-c... Basically, this "Cyrus Hodes" guy, thought stability was worthless before StableDiffusion, sold out his stake for $100. That is a fair assessment, because Stability before SD was completely aimless and going nowhere, and definitely not worth anything. However, Emad spotted an incredible bet, and obtained the naming rights to a latent diffusion model for cheap. And the titanic success of SD instantly propelled Stability to a serious player on the AI world. Hence the 100 mil raise afterwards. Needless to say, this Cyrus guy is extremely mad. If you check his credentials, he's not a technical guy, but actually extremely political, full of adviser roles to OECD or governmental organizations. Therefore its unsurprising that he: 1. Is able to organize the multi-month media effort in secret, to give journalists the angle to write against Stability. 2. Is ultra bitter about being kicked out of stability (But I doubt he would have been a good leader anyways at Stability, since AI transitioned from being a hype-based industry to a real product driven one after SD.) In any case, Stability has had some hiccups, but they appear to be recovering very well in the recent months. They've had 3 separate product launches. 1. SDXL, the first successor to SD that finally has community acceptance (So the actual useful fine-tunes and ecosystems can grow around it) 2. Stablebeluga, a fast-follower high quality fine-tune for Llama2 with decent acceptance 3. Stablecode, a open source coding-specific LLM It shows their R&D team is once again working, and gaining the confidence of the community again, after the two disasters that was SD2.0 and stableLM
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    > Needless to say, this Cyrus guy is extremely mad. If you check his credentials, he's not a technical guy, but actually extremely political, full of adviser roles to OECD or governmental organizations. Therefore its unsurprising that he: > 1. Is able to organize the multi-month media effort in secret, to give journalists the angle to write against Stability. This is cryptocurrency levels of conspiracy theory. Do you have any evidence? Or do you have an existing track record to back up these claims at least?
- nonbirithm 3y ago
  I don't know if this is 100% a hit piece if so many people really did resign citing emad as the main problem. If he is a compulsive liar or as incompetent as his co-workers claim then it's a red flag to me. I remember the one time talked about how he could scrape data behind paywalls and about deliberately bypassing anti-scraping techniques on Twitter. I don't think it was a very good PR move. In the back of my mind I always had this thought that Stability could be some kind of AI accelerationist fund - hype up a shining future, raise enough capital to clear the bar for model training, release their model unencumbered and gather a fervent following of gracious users, and... not have a fully realized plan for what comes after. But I have a feeling that even if they go under people will still be talking about Stability and their influence on generative art for a long while, at least until another freely available model can oust Stable Diffusion.
  - emadm 3y ago
    That was just the hate mob attacking I noted that the most interesting data is behind firewalls as in private data as our entire model is open models to private data => not using that data to train our models You can also license that data smartly, with royalty schemes and more, three no reason to get past paywalls etc nor do we do so (others do of course) We are the only AI company to even offer opt outs, first models soon on that
- tmaly 3y ago
  I personally think the Stable Diffusion product being somewhat open in that I can download it and run it on my home desktop is pretty amazing. That along is encouraging some much interesting innovation in this new type of art. People are creating all sorts of cool LoRas.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Bjorkbat 3y ago
This article is merely summarizing a longer article at Bloomberg, in case anyone would like to read something more substantial. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-08/stability-ai-s-lead-threatened-by-departures-concerns-over-ceo?sref=YfHlo0rL&in_source=embedded-checkout-banner https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-08/stability...
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Wouldn't happen to have an archive.org version would you?
  - skygazer 3y ago
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stability-ai-losing-executives-engineers-050010638.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stability-ai-losing-executive...
  - seedless-sensat 3y ago
    https://archive.li/txifb https://archive.li/txifb
    - carom 3y ago
      What browser do these links actually work in? Every time I load one it is an SSL error with no option to continue.
      - andreareina 3y ago
        Are you using cloudflare for dns?
        haldujai 3y ago
        iCloud Private Relay also uses Cloudflare DNS which I only recently learned in case anyone else was unaware. With that said 8.8.8.8 is still throwing me into an infinite Cloudflare captcha loop.
shicholas 3y ago
This company may get sued out of existence thanks to Getty Images. I think those advocating for responsible AI should root for Getty in their lawsuit. https://www.reuters.com/legal/getty-images-lawsuit-says-stability-ai-misused-photos-train-ai-2023-02-06/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/getty-images-lawsuit-says-stab...
- jrflowers 3y ago
  This is a good point. “Responsible AI” in practice means “Closed boxes created and rented out by Sam Altman’s companies” Not “Semi-open boxes created by Some Other Guys that people can use on their own hardware” and we should be glad that the big stock photo site can afford expensive lawyers to codify this natural truth into law.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    Why shouldn’t I be allowed to use these models on my own hardware for personal use and experimentation?
    - mvandermeulen 3y ago
      I think the parent commenter is being appropriately facetious…
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      According to many op eds that I have read, we should not even consider running models without paying Mr. Altman because there is a mean guy that works on the other models
- astrange 3y ago
  I think you should not because I would like Google Image Search to remain legal.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    Google Image Search reads images in order to index and create thumbnails. And similar to Google Search clearly falls within the fair use doctrine. Stable Diffusion and other AI models however create unauthorised derivative works.
fortran77 3y ago
I like Stable Diffusion! It can run even on old NVIDIA cards (like a 1080) and is truly open source (unlike other companies with "open" in their name). I hope it, or something like it survives.
HanClinto 3y ago
I don't like hit-piece journalism like this.
klabb3 3y ago
> A particularly eyebrow-raising claim […] is that the 40-year-old CEO has claimed he was employed as a spy for the British government. He also insists that he's spoken to more than one prime minister about building AI for nation-states. > Earlier this summer, Forbes published an exposé that highlighted his "history of exaggeration," and in its opening lines notes that Mostaque's claim that he has a master's degree from Oxford didn't hold up to scrutiny. Those statements are very precise and can really only be true or false. I can’t verify the veracity, but if they’re false, he is lying, not embellishing or “exaggerating”. There is a forgiving attitude towards compulsive liars in tech startups, and perhaps business in general, but that’s a cultural decease. There is no reason for journalists to play along in shifting the Overton window way into this kafkaesque relativistic worldview dictated by a small group of sociopaths and their enablers.
- emadm 3y ago
  The spy thing was puzzling then realised it was likely because it my previous work on counter extremism some elements of which were public and they didn’t bother checking https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1689376585047003136?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1689376585047003136?s=4... Masters degree was because I didn’t pay for postage for it to be sent which they acknowledged but spun, got it now https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1682124779426553856?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1682124779426553856?s=4...
sinuhe69 3y ago
The CEO to the side, how is the business side of Stability AI? I believe it’s hard to build a business on open-source AI at this stage. Perhaps through rendering services to other or awaiting for selling themselves? Meta can open sourced their models and weights because they make tons of money from other sources but a startup can only burn investors’ money, though. For the community, open-source AI is a blessing, no question.
- dsign 3y ago
  > I believe it’s hard to build a business on open-source AI at this stage. I would say it makes sense to build a business on running open-source AI models. I’m a hacker with side-projects. The outputs of ML models are useful to my side projects. But there is a world of difference between whipping up a tiny bit of Python code, or even using a web interface to query an open source model online, than running that same model locally. For starters, I would need to invest a few hundred bucks in hard disk alone. My 3090 is no good to run a bunch of models, so I would have to invest in a more beefy setup. And, when the hardware is home and properly installed, I would have to spend tons and tons of hours fiddling with the code and its setup. I rather put all those resources to the direct function of my side-projects, and not to something that, say, Stability AI can offer me for cents and in seconds, at least for the volume of services that I need. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be scenarios where the financial equation goes the other way, but for me at least that hasn’t been the case so far.
  - sinuhe69 3y ago
    Running AI models is extremely expensive. If you want to offer it to the public, you have to plan capacity very accurately, otherwise, either the quality will suffer or you will bleed too much money, too early. Take OpenAI for example, even with their enormous popularity, I believe they are still making huge losses. The only way they can survive (right now) is with the huge financial injection from Microsoft. Besides, you can run your AI models on GCP or AWS and other providers easily, no need to invest locally. For a pay-on-hours tariff, it’ll be affordable for experiments. Huggingface is yes taking care of all the “logistics” for you already.
mikhailfranco 3y ago
Oxford confers an honorary MA to any bachelor's graduate who applies. No extra work or exam is required. https://www.new.ox.ac.uk/oxford-ma-0 https://www.new.ox.ac.uk/oxford-ma-0 The only question is whether Emad applied and was awarded the MA.
- throwoutway 3y ago
  So they will give it to you after only a period of time? > In Oxford (as in Cambridge), the status of Master of Arts is a mark of seniority within the University which may be conferred 21 terms after matriculation.
throwoutway 3y ago
Not sure if this might help? https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/somiq5/little_project_to_access_wireguard_over_any/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/somiq5/little_p... Tunnels WireGuard over a websocket
xchip 3y ago
I'll file this in the folder where I store similar apocalyptic articles. We heard the same about Google, nvidia, Microsoft... And yet we have a new one.

What is this article really about? So many details missing about the $70k bill to assume is the wrongdoing of the CEO or company. The article smells like someone wants to build an argument against Stable Diffusion. I don't think that any of the arguments on the article hold to imply that Stable Diffusion (company) is crumbling. As an example, the "I sold 15% of the stake for $100" argument from the previous cofounder doesn't hold unless proven otherwise by a judge. The context always matter: is not the same selling 15% when there were no investors or IP, to selling it under coercion... but that a judge will be way better to assess than people external to the matter. I wonder what's the gain behind publishing this kind of "yellow" articles (and to whom)

dontknowmuch 3y ago
Looks like a hit piece planted to build momentum to oust the CEO.
formvoltron 3y ago
why would anyone bother to sell for $100? I mean just get a job as a UPS driver!
- NegativeK 3y ago
  I've got some incredibly worthless stuff that I'd take $100 for.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Is any of it a substantial stake in an operating generative-AI company? If so, I'll buy it for $100; I literally don't intend to do more diligence than that to find a likely overlay.
    - emadm 3y ago
      He wanted out completely and no association after first project failed https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1680774535342358528?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1680774535342358528?s=4...
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        According to the account of someone who has a substantial vested interest in that being the case. (It might be the case, in which "they got what they asked for".) In a case where each side has a substantial vested interest in their story being accepted as true, it's wise to be skeptical of the claims on both sides and look for other, corroborating or contradicting evidence.
        emadm 3y ago
        It's pretty clear cut as his suit has three claims 1. Did not inform him of pivot and generative AI art (false, even generated AI art for him) 2. Did not inform him of fundraise/inflows (also false) 3. Either of the above are not legal under Delaware law (also false) We will find out in a few months I suppose.
- defen 3y ago
  It's possible that he perceived his ownership stake as having negative value - e.g. due to tax reasons or other regulatory overhead (needing to participate in board meetings or whatever), legal risk (they get sued for doing something desperate and dumb and he needs to participate in the lawsuit) etc. But you can't just dissolve your shares, you have to either shut the company down entirely or sell your stake to someone. If he thought the company was truly worthless / negative expected value then $100 is fair consideration. A famous example of this is Ronald Wayne selling his 10% stake in Apple for $800 because he was worried that Jobs would incur a bunch of risky debt that he'd be liable for.
  - chii 3y ago
    i would've imagined that a limited liability corporation means that the lowest value it can go is zero, not negative. A shareholder cannot and should not ever be responsible for the debts of the company imho. As for time costs, the shareholder could just not attend or do anything, if they perceive the work to be of worthless value, and thus, should therefore have zero as the floor, rather than negative!
- esperent 3y ago
  In case anyone is out of the loop here, UPS drivers have a strong union and negotiated a great rate of pay. The story being spun in the media is that us tech workers are angry about this for some reason. It's one of the most blatant attempts to pit workers against workers and undermine unions that I've ever seen.
mikhmha 3y ago
Really? I think the untrustworthiness of the CEO and their tendency to embellish facts around their background is a massive red flag. These have been reported on multiple times the past few months. Why lie about having a masters degree or working at a trading firm? And of course you may say that all CEOs are liars. And I would agree. But the smart CEO’s know not to lie about trivial things like education credentials. I don’t think this is a hit piece. I think the incompetency of the CEO is finally bubbling up to the surface and rotting the company from the inside. And now the original believers are starting to turn on their former saviour.
- cma 3y ago
  > Why lie about having a masters degree or working at a trading firm? Maybe not really having the degree but it mostly being satisfied is a positive with venture capitalist after the richest man in the world had problems with his physics degree.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - emadm 3y ago
    It was a weird allegation when I paid the postage and got the MA from Oxford a couple of weeks later https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1682091613278072832?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1682091613278072832?s=4... Told them that and more https://emad.posthaven.com/on-setting-the-record-straight https://emad.posthaven.com/on-setting-the-record-straight On the cofounder share sale thing it was the Ron Wayne effect with massive sour grapes and him straight up lying https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1680774535342358528?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1680774535342358528?s=4...
    - ilaksh 3y ago
      Can you detail the years of study after your completion of the BA that enabled you to be awarded the MA? Or is this a "free" MA indicating "seniority"? If it's the latter, then that's deliberately misleading to keep referencing it as if it were a normal MA. I do appreciate your efforts with the open source models though.
anonylizard 3y ago
There is 100% a hit piece effort against stability. It is extremely unusual, for multiple media outlets to repeatedly write an article against a small startup, that's completely unrelated to customer harm or say employee abuse. Wow, the founder fudged his VC presentations, wow, the masters degree wasn't legit, like WHO CARES? The only missing piece was the motivation, who exactly holds such a grudge against Emad really? Then the missing piece finally came to light: https://www.reuters.com/technology/stability-ai-is-sued-by-co-founder-who-says-he-was-duped-selling-stake-100-2023-07-13/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/stability-ai-is-sued-by-c... Basically, this "Cyrus Hodes" guy, thought stability was worthless before StableDiffusion, sold out his stake for $100. That is a fair assessment, because Stability before SD was completely aimless and going nowhere, and definitely not worth anything. However, Emad spotted an incredible bet, and obtained the naming rights to a latent diffusion model for cheap. And the titanic success of SD instantly propelled Stability to a serious player on the AI world. Hence the 100 mil raise afterwards. Needless to say, this Cyrus guy is extremely mad. If you check his credentials, he's not a technical guy, but actually extremely political, full of adviser roles to OECD or governmental organizations. Therefore its unsurprising that he: 1. Is able to organize the multi-month media effort in secret, to give journalists the angle to write against Stability. 2. Is ultra bitter about being kicked out of stability (But I doubt he would have been a good leader anyways at Stability, since AI transitioned from being a hype-based industry to a real product driven one after SD.) In any case, Stability has had some hiccups, but they appear to be recovering very well in the recent months. They've had 3 separate product launches. 1. SDXL, the first successor to SD that finally has community acceptance (So the actual useful fine-tunes and ecosystems can grow around it) 2. Stablebeluga, a fast-follower high quality fine-tune for Llama2 with decent acceptance 3. Stablecode, a open source coding-specific LLM It shows their R&D team is once again working, and gaining the confidence of the community again, after the two disasters that was SD2.0 and stableLM
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  > Needless to say, this Cyrus guy is extremely mad. If you check his credentials, he's not a technical guy, but actually extremely political, full of adviser roles to OECD or governmental organizations. Therefore its unsurprising that he: > 1. Is able to organize the multi-month media effort in secret, to give journalists the angle to write against Stability. This is cryptocurrency levels of conspiracy theory. Do you have any evidence? Or do you have an existing track record to back up these claims at least?
nonbirithm 3y ago
I don't know if this is 100% a hit piece if so many people really did resign citing emad as the main problem. If he is a compulsive liar or as incompetent as his co-workers claim then it's a red flag to me. I remember the one time talked about how he could scrape data behind paywalls and about deliberately bypassing anti-scraping techniques on Twitter. I don't think it was a very good PR move. In the back of my mind I always had this thought that Stability could be some kind of AI accelerationist fund - hype up a shining future, raise enough capital to clear the bar for model training, release their model unencumbered and gather a fervent following of gracious users, and... not have a fully realized plan for what comes after. But I have a feeling that even if they go under people will still be talking about Stability and their influence on generative art for a long while, at least until another freely available model can oust Stable Diffusion.
- emadm 3y ago
  That was just the hate mob attacking I noted that the most interesting data is behind firewalls as in private data as our entire model is open models to private data => not using that data to train our models You can also license that data smartly, with royalty schemes and more, three no reason to get past paywalls etc nor do we do so (others do of course) We are the only AI company to even offer opt outs, first models soon on that
tmaly 3y ago
I personally think the Stable Diffusion product being somewhat open in that I can download it and run it on my home desktop is pretty amazing. That along is encouraging some much interesting innovation in this new type of art. People are creating all sorts of cool LoRas.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Bjorkbat 3y ago

This article is merely summarizing a longer article at Bloomberg, in case anyone would like to read something more substantial. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-08/stability-ai-s-lead-threatened-by-departures-concerns-over-ceo?sref=YfHlo0rL&in_source=embedded-checkout-banner https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-08/stability...

ShamelessC 3y ago
Wouldn't happen to have an archive.org version would you?
- skygazer 3y ago
  https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stability-ai-losing-executives-engineers-050010638.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stability-ai-losing-executive...
- seedless-sensat 3y ago
  https://archive.li/txifb https://archive.li/txifb
  - carom 3y ago
    What browser do these links actually work in? Every time I load one it is an SSL error with no option to continue.
    - andreareina 3y ago
      Are you using cloudflare for dns?
      - haldujai 3y ago
        iCloud Private Relay also uses Cloudflare DNS which I only recently learned in case anyone else was unaware. With that said 8.8.8.8 is still throwing me into an infinite Cloudflare captcha loop.

shicholas 3y ago

This company may get sued out of existence thanks to Getty Images. I think those advocating for responsible AI should root for Getty in their lawsuit. https://www.reuters.com/legal/getty-images-lawsuit-says-stability-ai-misused-photos-train-ai-2023-02-06/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/getty-images-lawsuit-says-stab...

jrflowers 3y ago
This is a good point. “Responsible AI” in practice means “Closed boxes created and rented out by Sam Altman’s companies” Not “Semi-open boxes created by Some Other Guys that people can use on their own hardware” and we should be glad that the big stock photo site can afford expensive lawyers to codify this natural truth into law.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Why shouldn’t I be allowed to use these models on my own hardware for personal use and experimentation?
  - mvandermeulen 3y ago
    I think the parent commenter is being appropriately facetious…
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    According to many op eds that I have read, we should not even consider running models without paying Mr. Altman because there is a mean guy that works on the other models
astrange 3y ago
I think you should not because I would like Google Image Search to remain legal.
- threeseed 3y ago
  Google Image Search reads images in order to index and create thumbnails. And similar to Google Search clearly falls within the fair use doctrine. Stable Diffusion and other AI models however create unauthorised derivative works.

fortran77 3y ago

I like Stable Diffusion! It can run even on old NVIDIA cards (like a 1080) and is truly open source (unlike other companies with "open" in their name). I hope it, or something like it survives.

HanClinto 3y ago

I don't like hit-piece journalism like this.

klabb3 3y ago

> A particularly eyebrow-raising claim […] is that the 40-year-old CEO has claimed he was employed as a spy for the British government. He also insists that he's spoken to more than one prime minister about building AI for nation-states. > Earlier this summer, Forbes published an exposé that highlighted his "history of exaggeration," and in its opening lines notes that Mostaque's claim that he has a master's degree from Oxford didn't hold up to scrutiny. Those statements are very precise and can really only be true or false. I can’t verify the veracity, but if they’re false, he is lying, not embellishing or “exaggerating”. There is a forgiving attitude towards compulsive liars in tech startups, and perhaps business in general, but that’s a cultural decease. There is no reason for journalists to play along in shifting the Overton window way into this kafkaesque relativistic worldview dictated by a small group of sociopaths and their enablers.

emadm 3y ago
The spy thing was puzzling then realised it was likely because it my previous work on counter extremism some elements of which were public and they didn’t bother checking https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1689376585047003136?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1689376585047003136?s=4... Masters degree was because I didn’t pay for postage for it to be sent which they acknowledged but spun, got it now https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1682124779426553856?s=46 https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1682124779426553856?s=4...

sinuhe69 3y ago

The CEO to the side, how is the business side of Stability AI? I believe it’s hard to build a business on open-source AI at this stage. Perhaps through rendering services to other or awaiting for selling themselves? Meta can open sourced their models and weights because they make tons of money from other sources but a startup can only burn investors’ money, though. For the community, open-source AI is a blessing, no question.

dsign 3y ago
> I believe it’s hard to build a business on open-source AI at this stage. I would say it makes sense to build a business on running open-source AI models. I’m a hacker with side-projects. The outputs of ML models are useful to my side projects. But there is a world of difference between whipping up a tiny bit of Python code, or even using a web interface to query an open source model online, than running that same model locally. For starters, I would need to invest a few hundred bucks in hard disk alone. My 3090 is no good to run a bunch of models, so I would have to invest in a more beefy setup. And, when the hardware is home and properly installed, I would have to spend tons and tons of hours fiddling with the code and its setup. I rather put all those resources to the direct function of my side-projects, and not to something that, say, Stability AI can offer me for cents and in seconds, at least for the volume of services that I need. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be scenarios where the financial equation goes the other way, but for me at least that hasn’t been the case so far.
- sinuhe69 3y ago
  Running AI models is extremely expensive. If you want to offer it to the public, you have to plan capacity very accurately, otherwise, either the quality will suffer or you will bleed too much money, too early. Take OpenAI for example, even with their enormous popularity, I believe they are still making huge losses. The only way they can survive (right now) is with the huge financial injection from Microsoft. Besides, you can run your AI models on GCP or AWS and other providers easily, no need to invest locally. For a pay-on-hours tariff, it’ll be affordable for experiments. Huggingface is yes taking care of all the “logistics” for you already.

mikhailfranco 3y ago

Oxford confers an honorary MA to any bachelor's graduate who applies. No extra work or exam is required. https://www.new.ox.ac.uk/oxford-ma-0 https://www.new.ox.ac.uk/oxford-ma-0 The only question is whether Emad applied and was awarded the MA.

throwoutway 3y ago
So they will give it to you after only a period of time? > In Oxford (as in Cambridge), the status of Master of Arts is a mark of seniority within the University which may be conferred 21 terms after matriculation.

throwoutway 3y ago

Not sure if this might help? https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/somiq5/little_project_to_access_wireguard_over_any/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/somiq5/little_p... Tunnels WireGuard over a websocket

xchip 3y ago

I'll file this in the folder where I store similar apocalyptic articles. We heard the same about Google, nvidia, Microsoft... And yet we have a new one.