6 ms·

Multiple Stability AI researchers are departing, CEO says

150 points by ilamont 3y ago

hbrav 3y ago
This seems like a general problem for a company like this: your great success demonstrates that your employees are incredibly valuable. And sometimes businesses may say things like "our people are our greatest asset", but that's not actually true. They're not an asset. Your IP is an asset, and you own that. But your people are often capable of going elsewhere and producing equally good work, and they're likely to do that if they get a better offer.
- jackblemming 3y ago
  So give them real ownership of the company and real fruits of their labor. Otherwise yea why wouldn’t they go to the highest bidder?
  - lil-grandson 3y ago
    That would be ridiculous. All the upside is supposed to go to a small handful of people who already have more money than they need.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    Are you talking about options?
- open592 3y ago
  It's no different than professional sports. When you win the super bowl for instance, the value of many of your players (employees) suddenly jump. At that point it's infeasible to pay everyone what they can realistically get on the market. Thus you identify and pay your most essential assets, and the others leave and receive huge pay bumps. I think it's very valuable for the industry, and as long as the teams who are picking up these employees are able to utilize them effectively, will result in broader innovation.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > At that point it's infeasible to pay everyone what they can realistically get on the market. Largely, because of salary caps created fairly explicitly to break the winning -> popularity -> money -> monopolizing talent -> winning positive feedback loop. Success feedback loops aren't quite so constrained in most other industries.
    - entangledqubit 3y ago
      With the compensation deferral setup (like Ohtani in MLB), I'm curious if the influence of the caps will be eroded.
  - golergka 3y ago
    Interesting dynamic, never thought of that. Were there instances where a sports club actually didn't want to win some title to prevent exactly this from happening? How would the sports association react if the club decided to throw the match for this reason?
    - passion__desire 3y ago
      Sumo wrestlers throwing away matches so that the other player can record a winning streak.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Well, I know it’s not the same thing. But some sports clubs do try to lose so they can get a higher place in the draft picks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanking_(sports) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanking_(sports) And of course when kids don’t want to play during the summer /s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Losing_Edge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Losing_Edge
- galoisscobi 3y ago
  You assume that IP once created stands on its own. The programming as theory building view suggests that IP will degrade once people who have robust mental models about how the IP was created and works. So software/IP in essence has two critical parts that need to be there, the actual work that was created and robust mental models living in people’s heads who continue to work on those projects. It also goes against the idea that programmers are replaceable cogs that management can change out as and when they want to.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding the GP. He's not saying the people aren't valuable; he's saying they aren't assets. That is to say, they aren't property. Which isn't what 'asset' means, but it is the central meaning; using it on people always felt squicky to me.
- kcorbitt 3y ago
  In my experience this kind of mass exodus is more associated with failures in leadership/management than an inevitable result of success. For example, OpenAI has been far more successful than Stability and its senior employees obviously have lots of options, but its staff turnover ratio feels much smaller than Stability's.
  - brandall10 3y ago
    Isn't that largely because they're all locked into comp structures that can net top researchers something ~$10M? I guess one could argue it's a management issue that Sam Altman figured out a way to structure his company to make that possible.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  > They’re not an asset. Your IP is an asset. While true for existing IP for industries like pharma, for industries like AI, your IP isn’t worth anything unless it keeps evolving. If you lose your key researchers, you’re done.
- stavros 3y ago
  "Our people are our greatest third-party suppliers" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
- hackerlight 3y ago
  They're not an asset but they're a hell of a lot more valuable than the IP. Ask anyone who runs a research org. The IP is nice but it deprecates rapidly. It's the fastest depreciating asset ever. The value is all the machine (network of talented people, culture) that builds the machine (IP).
close04 3y ago
The source article [0] might be a better link. The tweet (from the article's author himself) isn't adding anything. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/03/20/key-stable-diffusion-researchers-leave-stability-ai-as-company-flounders/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/03/20/key-stabl...
- jprete 3y ago
  Source was posted as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402
- ilamont 3y ago
  It was paywalled for me.
mupuff1234 3y ago
Im surprised to hear they are struggling to raise money, I figured investors were throwing money at them.
- Filligree 3y ago
  Their value proposition thus far has been "Give stuff away". I'm grateful for it, and I think they should have government funding if necessary -- the upsides are huge, just little of it goes to Stability -- but it's easy to see why investors would be wary.
  - Auracle 3y ago
    Yeah. Every time Emad has talked about their business model changes I've always thought "...that's it?" I personally think they're missing some low hanging fruit, though I suppose it might be in the name of "safety." I believe Stability (maybe Clipdrop?) at least did have some sort of paid Lora or other training, but I tried it and it was awful. Considering they made the models surely they would have the absolute best insight into full fine tuning it and could roll out a service to do so. I think they talked about doing it B2B at a presumably much higher cost, but a consumer facing, easy to use way of doing it would at least pull in some money. Of course, the second someone uses that to train child porn or whatever they'll be in hot water.
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    Failure to monetize. (How is this going to make money? [0]) 0. https://websd.mlc.ai/#text-to-image-generation-demo https://websd.mlc.ai/#text-to-image-generation-demo It's readily apparent that any sufficiently useful AI/CV/ML should be deployed to solve specific, immediate, niche problems of individual people that they're willing to pay small amounts of money or assign referral commissions for: - Product personal shopper-recommender goes out and crawls reviews and pricing to find what and where someone should buy something based on a prompt. - Where to live. - Where to go out. - What to have for dinner. - Find a plumber, carpenter, etc. and do open source due-diligence on them. - How to optimally invest money based on circumstances, assumptions, and speculative outcome distribution. - How to redecorate a room. In a business context, there are many classes of problems AI can semi-automate including: - Decision support - Feature prioritization based on support data and social media sentiment - Supply (inventory) and demand forecasting - Pricing optimization
TrackerFF 3y ago
1. Work for some prestigious ML/AI research lab / startup. 2. Identify a demand in the market. 3. Quit the lab/startup, launch your own startup. 4. Get acquired by some established AI company or FAANG tech megacorp. 5. Retire.
- Solvency 3y ago
  You don't need to identify a demand. Just make an AI startup and nail the brand/marketing and you're equally likely to attract offers. It's a gold rush, get in now.
  - CapeTheory 3y ago
    So far it feels like a gold rush without much gold, just a lot of very expensive picks and shovels.
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      And all of the shovels have Nvidia written on them
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Because everybody’s so busy selling shovels that no one’s digging for gold, so there’s no one to sell shovels to. That’s not totally true, but we’re all here trying to outsmart one another in order to have a Sure Thing. Well I’m here to tell you that there are no Sure Things in life except for death and taxes, so take a risk, jump on a random plot of land, and start digging.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I sure hope so, I'd like to get paid for developing software for another 5-10 years to pay off a mortgage at least… (What am I doing to do when AI isn't just at the level of "intern"?)
    - over_bridge 3y ago
      Finally a solution to the problem of tech companies sitting on huge piles of cash with nothing to buy! Give it all to NVIDIA
robotnikman 3y ago
It makes me wonder if I should switch from my current position as a Java dev to something related to AI and machine learning. It seems that is going to be the future now, and there seems to be a big need for people with that knowledge right now.
- michpoch 3y ago
  Yes, if you're willing to invest X years into becoming relevant on the AI/ML market, and you believe than in X years there will be still too few AI/ML specialists - then it's a great idea.
  - khazhoux 3y ago
    There's a huge amount of help needed in AI/ML in non-researcher roles (infrastructure, pipelines, testing, etc). I'd say that the bulk of AI/ML orgs are actually just that, in my experience. (I'd further argue that the number of actual "AI researchers" that actually contribute enough to justify their mega-million comp packages is small indeed... but that's a separate topic)
    - robotnikman 3y ago
      Infrastructure was another area I was thinking of possibly moving into as well, since AI of course still has to rely on that as well.
  - turnsout 3y ago
    To the parent: “AI” in 2024 is just using REST APIs. Don’t bother inventing new models, just get up to speed on what the various vendors are good at and the basic techniques (particularly Agents/ReAct and RAG) and you’ve learned enough. The demand for AI is almost unlimited right now, and it’s definitely not too late. It’s like 2009 in the iPhone dev era; plenty of time to quickly learn ObjC.
- AznHisoka 3y ago
  yep I did an analysis on this and that’s definitely where the software jobs are right now: https://bloomberry.com/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-tech-job-market-data-from-20m-job-postings/ https://bloomberry.com/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-tech-job-mar...
pksebben 3y ago
Hey now, there's a real lack of information in this tweet. Just a link to a paywalled article from a dodgy financial journal. This is the second time this has been referenced on the front page and I still don't know who they're talking about or what the details are (and I'm not about to give money to forbes, of all people.)
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Some more discussion on Forbes article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402
Jackson__ 3y ago
Interesting. It's not mentioned in the article, but the team behind the recently released "Stable Cascade" models has left stability as well. Personally, I assume stability has hit a scaling/money issue on image generation models, which is why they might be pivoting to other domains where you can still make headlines spending <$50M on training runs, like their 3D models.
Bjorkbat 3y ago
I mean, since we're sharing Forbes links https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-diffusion-emad-mostaque-stability-ai-exaggeration/?sh=437f3ec075c5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-di... The CEO of Stability seems to be rather controversial person at the helm of a rather controversial company. I'm honestly surprised more people haven't left the company by now, unless they had some absurd incentives to stick around.
- achow 3y ago
  https://archive.is/NHdKM https://archive.is/NHdKM
artninja1988 3y ago
Sad to hear, they really created some awesome models for the community. Looks like their entire diffusion team left. Do we know where they went to? Hopefully another organisation pops up without the incompetent discord based leadership and that actually finds a way to finance themselves while releasing weights in some capacity.

150 points by ilamont 3y ago

This seems like a general problem for a company like this: your great success demonstrates that your employees are incredibly valuable. And sometimes businesses may say things like "our people are our greatest asset", but that's not actually true. They're not an asset. Your IP is an asset, and you own that. But your people are often capable of going elsewhere and producing equally good work, and they're likely to do that if they get a better offer.

jackblemming 3y ago
So give them real ownership of the company and real fruits of their labor. Otherwise yea why wouldn’t they go to the highest bidder?
- lil-grandson 3y ago
  That would be ridiculous. All the upside is supposed to go to a small handful of people who already have more money than they need.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  Are you talking about options?
open592 3y ago
It's no different than professional sports. When you win the super bowl for instance, the value of many of your players (employees) suddenly jump. At that point it's infeasible to pay everyone what they can realistically get on the market. Thus you identify and pay your most essential assets, and the others leave and receive huge pay bumps. I think it's very valuable for the industry, and as long as the teams who are picking up these employees are able to utilize them effectively, will result in broader innovation.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > At that point it's infeasible to pay everyone what they can realistically get on the market. Largely, because of salary caps created fairly explicitly to break the winning -> popularity -> money -> monopolizing talent -> winning positive feedback loop. Success feedback loops aren't quite so constrained in most other industries.
  - entangledqubit 3y ago
    With the compensation deferral setup (like Ohtani in MLB), I'm curious if the influence of the caps will be eroded.
- golergka 3y ago
  Interesting dynamic, never thought of that. Were there instances where a sports club actually didn't want to win some title to prevent exactly this from happening? How would the sports association react if the club decided to throw the match for this reason?
  - passion__desire 3y ago
    Sumo wrestlers throwing away matches so that the other player can record a winning streak.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Well, I know it’s not the same thing. But some sports clubs do try to lose so they can get a higher place in the draft picks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanking_(sports) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanking_(sports) And of course when kids don’t want to play during the summer /s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Losing_Edge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Losing_Edge
galoisscobi 3y ago
You assume that IP once created stands on its own. The programming as theory building view suggests that IP will degrade once people who have robust mental models about how the IP was created and works. So software/IP in essence has two critical parts that need to be there, the actual work that was created and robust mental models living in people’s heads who continue to work on those projects. It also goes against the idea that programmers are replaceable cogs that management can change out as and when they want to.
- Filligree 3y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding the GP. He's not saying the people aren't valuable; he's saying they aren't assets. That is to say, they aren't property. Which isn't what 'asset' means, but it is the central meaning; using it on people always felt squicky to me.
kcorbitt 3y ago
In my experience this kind of mass exodus is more associated with failures in leadership/management than an inevitable result of success. For example, OpenAI has been far more successful than Stability and its senior employees obviously have lots of options, but its staff turnover ratio feels much smaller than Stability's.
- brandall10 3y ago
  Isn't that largely because they're all locked into comp structures that can net top researchers something ~$10M? I guess one could argue it's a management issue that Sam Altman figured out a way to structure his company to make that possible.
darth_avocado 3y ago
> They’re not an asset. Your IP is an asset. While true for existing IP for industries like pharma, for industries like AI, your IP isn’t worth anything unless it keeps evolving. If you lose your key researchers, you’re done.
stavros 3y ago
"Our people are our greatest third-party suppliers" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
hackerlight 3y ago
They're not an asset but they're a hell of a lot more valuable than the IP. Ask anyone who runs a research org. The IP is nice but it deprecates rapidly. It's the fastest depreciating asset ever. The value is all the machine (network of talented people, culture) that builds the machine (IP).

close04 3y ago

The source article [0] might be a better link. The tweet (from the article's author himself) isn't adding anything. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/03/20/key-stable-diffusion-researchers-leave-stability-ai-as-company-flounders/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/03/20/key-stabl...

jprete 3y ago
Source was posted as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402
ilamont 3y ago
It was paywalled for me.

mupuff1234 3y ago

Im surprised to hear they are struggling to raise money, I figured investors were throwing money at them.

Filligree 3y ago
Their value proposition thus far has been "Give stuff away". I'm grateful for it, and I think they should have government funding if necessary -- the upsides are huge, just little of it goes to Stability -- but it's easy to see why investors would be wary.
- Auracle 3y ago
  Yeah. Every time Emad has talked about their business model changes I've always thought "...that's it?" I personally think they're missing some low hanging fruit, though I suppose it might be in the name of "safety." I believe Stability (maybe Clipdrop?) at least did have some sort of paid Lora or other training, but I tried it and it was awful. Considering they made the models surely they would have the absolute best insight into full fine tuning it and could roll out a service to do so. I think they talked about doing it B2B at a presumably much higher cost, but a consumer facing, easy to use way of doing it would at least pull in some money. Of course, the second someone uses that to train child porn or whatever they'll be in hot water.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Failure to monetize. (How is this going to make money? [0]) 0. https://websd.mlc.ai/#text-to-image-generation-demo https://websd.mlc.ai/#text-to-image-generation-demo It's readily apparent that any sufficiently useful AI/CV/ML should be deployed to solve specific, immediate, niche problems of individual people that they're willing to pay small amounts of money or assign referral commissions for: - Product personal shopper-recommender goes out and crawls reviews and pricing to find what and where someone should buy something based on a prompt. - Where to live. - Where to go out. - What to have for dinner. - Find a plumber, carpenter, etc. and do open source due-diligence on them. - How to optimally invest money based on circumstances, assumptions, and speculative outcome distribution. - How to redecorate a room. In a business context, there are many classes of problems AI can semi-automate including: - Decision support - Feature prioritization based on support data and social media sentiment - Supply (inventory) and demand forecasting - Pricing optimization

TrackerFF 3y ago

1. Work for some prestigious ML/AI research lab / startup. 2. Identify a demand in the market. 3. Quit the lab/startup, launch your own startup. 4. Get acquired by some established AI company or FAANG tech megacorp. 5. Retire.

Solvency 3y ago
You don't need to identify a demand. Just make an AI startup and nail the brand/marketing and you're equally likely to attract offers. It's a gold rush, get in now.
- CapeTheory 3y ago
  So far it feels like a gold rush without much gold, just a lot of very expensive picks and shovels.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    And all of the shovels have Nvidia written on them
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Because everybody’s so busy selling shovels that no one’s digging for gold, so there’s no one to sell shovels to. That’s not totally true, but we’re all here trying to outsmart one another in order to have a Sure Thing. Well I’m here to tell you that there are no Sure Things in life except for death and taxes, so take a risk, jump on a random plot of land, and start digging.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I sure hope so, I'd like to get paid for developing software for another 5-10 years to pay off a mortgage at least… (What am I doing to do when AI isn't just at the level of "intern"?)
  - over_bridge 3y ago
    Finally a solution to the problem of tech companies sitting on huge piles of cash with nothing to buy! Give it all to NVIDIA

robotnikman 3y ago

It makes me wonder if I should switch from my current position as a Java dev to something related to AI and machine learning. It seems that is going to be the future now, and there seems to be a big need for people with that knowledge right now.

michpoch 3y ago
Yes, if you're willing to invest X years into becoming relevant on the AI/ML market, and you believe than in X years there will be still too few AI/ML specialists - then it's a great idea.
- khazhoux 3y ago
  There's a huge amount of help needed in AI/ML in non-researcher roles (infrastructure, pipelines, testing, etc). I'd say that the bulk of AI/ML orgs are actually just that, in my experience. (I'd further argue that the number of actual "AI researchers" that actually contribute enough to justify their mega-million comp packages is small indeed... but that's a separate topic)
  - robotnikman 3y ago
    Infrastructure was another area I was thinking of possibly moving into as well, since AI of course still has to rely on that as well.
- turnsout 3y ago
  To the parent: “AI” in 2024 is just using REST APIs. Don’t bother inventing new models, just get up to speed on what the various vendors are good at and the basic techniques (particularly Agents/ReAct and RAG) and you’ve learned enough. The demand for AI is almost unlimited right now, and it’s definitely not too late. It’s like 2009 in the iPhone dev era; plenty of time to quickly learn ObjC.
AznHisoka 3y ago
yep I did an analysis on this and that’s definitely where the software jobs are right now: https://bloomberry.com/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-tech-job-market-data-from-20m-job-postings/ https://bloomberry.com/how-ai-is-disrupting-the-tech-job-mar...

pksebben 3y ago

Hey now, there's a real lack of information in this tweet. Just a link to a paywalled article from a dodgy financial journal. This is the second time this has been referenced on the front page and I still don't know who they're talking about or what the details are (and I'm not about to give money to forbes, of all people.)

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] Some more discussion on Forbes article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402

Jackson__ 3y ago

Interesting. It's not mentioned in the article, but the team behind the recently released "Stable Cascade" models has left stability as well. Personally, I assume stability has hit a scaling/money issue on image generation models, which is why they might be pivoting to other domains where you can still make headlines spending <$50M on training runs, like their 3D models.

Bjorkbat 3y ago

I mean, since we're sharing Forbes links https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-diffusion-emad-mostaque-stability-ai-exaggeration/?sh=437f3ec075c5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-di... The CEO of Stability seems to be rather controversial person at the helm of a rather controversial company. I'm honestly surprised more people haven't left the company by now, unless they had some absurd incentives to stick around.

achow 3y ago
https://archive.is/NHdKM https://archive.is/NHdKM

artninja1988 3y ago

Sad to hear, they really created some awesome models for the community. Looks like their entire diffusion team left. Do we know where they went to? Hopefully another organisation pops up without the incompetent discord based leadership and that actually finds a way to finance themselves while releasing weights in some capacity.