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How Stability AI’s founder tanked his billion-dollar startup
- minimaxir 3y agoThere has been a lot of news/retrospectives but this is new, and is based off of "Company documents and interviews with 32 current and former employees, investors, collaborators and industry observers"
- emadm 3y agoI kinda gave up on these reporters when they insisted on posting obvious lies, like in this case I don’t speak to Jensen since October 2022 and numbers and other reports were clearly fabricated. Like what do you do? I think you just ignore and ship good things, some great models coming across modalities and Stability AI is one of the fastest growing revenue companies ever despite the BS against us https://x.com/emostaque/status/1773766734522040508?s=46 https://x.com/emostaque/status/1773766734522040508?s=46
- jsemrau 3y agoI'd agree that OpenAI was a tarpit project for many years.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mnky9800n 3y agoBut you did ship good things and ran out of money anyways it seems
- emadm 3y agoCompany has money, revenue is better than peers with a path to profitability and one of the fastest ramps ever. Tesla, Apple, NVIDIA all had these moments as well as innumerable other good companies. Was tough to navigate through, very proud of team.
- consumer451 3y ago> and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” This gave me a flashback to a long time ago, when we couldn’t pay an AWS bill for a couple grand. Makes me wonder what the largest unpaid AWS bill looks like, and whose it was.
- jeeyoungk 3y agoFTX/Alameda also had unpaid AWS bill of ~single digit millions.
- maartenscholl 3y agoI'd be interested to know if Amazon has a client risk group, because I've seen a few of such large monthly bills, and I sure hope they don't settle these in arrears at such a low frequency as monthly payments.
- unclebucknasty 3y agoI'd be interested to see what Amazon's actual costs were on that bill. Their overall operating margins are around 30%, but it would be interesting to see the cost / revenue line items on a bill like this one.
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoIt would cost way less than 7M to build from scratch whatever they are using AWS for
- raymond_goo 3y agohttps://archive.is/snbeV https://archive.is/snbeV
- ronsor 3y agoPlease note that this Forbes author in particular seems to have a vendetta against Stability AI and has been publishing hit pieces for months now.
- minimaxir 3y agoThe accusations of bias is why it's very relevant that there are 32 independent sources for the article. Bloomberg also published a similar independent negative article about Stability AI, unless you believe both Forbes and Bloomberg have a thing against them: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-26/stability-ai-ceo-emad-mostaque-resignation-what-happened?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-26/stability...
- sandspar 3y agoPeople don't seem to have wrapped their heads around the consequences of media abundance coupled with media coordination. You can find 32 sources to back up anything.
- mattmaroon 3y agoI just had 32 unnamed sources tell me you cannot :)
- throwup238 3y agoI have 64 unnamed sources telling me that all of your sources are actually just you wearing different hats.
- mattmaroon 3y agoI have gotten to the point where I just give zero credibility to unnamed sources. And Forbes is sadly nowhere near as credible as it once was. It’s basically white collar Buzzfeed now. Which is not to say that I disagree with anything they said here or think they are lying, but if someone thinks it’s a hit piece, 30-some mostly unnamed sources won’t change their mind. A journalist can never be caught making up an unnamed source, it’s like saying “I don’t recall” on the stand.
- choxi 3y agoWasn’t Emad working at a hedge fund before this? I’m surprised the article glosses over the fact that he had 0 experience in the tech industry before starting one of the most ambitious tech projects ever
- robocat 3y agoAre Hedge Funds selection machines for extremely competitive immoral engineer-types? The cliché is CEO positions select for soiciopathy. Different games seem to select for certain types of antisocial thinking. Is there a pattern to the type of person (a) selected by hedge funds, (b) successful at hedge funds? I don't believe we should stereotyping individuals based on their group categories. Neither do I think that we can apply psych labels to groups. But we don't seem to have better ways to question the issue...
- hipadev23 3y agoGetting a job at a hedge fund is not particularly noteworthy. Being really good at it, however, is rare and those people don’t simply leave, as you’re earning the equivalent of a successful startup exit every year. Someone leaving a hedge fund while still early in their career is a strong negative signal. e.g. SBF and Caroline both from Jane Street.
- jack_riminton 3y agoDidn’t Bezos leave a hedge fund?
- emadm 3y agoI started as a hedge fund manager at 23 doing global macro at Pictet & quit when my son was diagnosed with autism to build an NLP team to analyse clinical trial & other data and undertook pathway analysis of neurotransmitters focusing on GABA/Glutamate balance to repurpose medicine to help him filter, after which he went to mainstream school. One of the things I am focused on now is bringing that research with the new medical LMs so for autism, cancer, MS, Alzheimer’s & more everyone has comprehensive, authoritative and up to date knowledge at their fingertips on these and also a guide so they never feel alone and helps them on their journey if they or a loved one gets this diagnosis. It will be open and transparent, took a while to build to here but looking forward to next steps. There is more to life than power and money.
- moneycantbuy 3y agoWhat are the good open source alternatives to stable diffusion for text to image generation?
- aabhay 3y agoJust browse huggingface and you’ll see literally hundreds. Lots of them are totally from-scratch trained, and not just fine tunes of SD.
- robotnikman 3y agoStill got to thank them for making AI image generation available to your average person, instead of permanently gated behind a cloud service.
- nickdothutton 3y agoNever run out of money. Whatever you have to do.
- astrange 3y agoThe point of limited liability corporations, and SV startup culture, is to make it safe to run out of money.
- moneycantbuy 3y agoEmad is Robin Hood. Took VC wealth and redistributed it to the masses. Would love to see this more often. Do we really want Microsoft to monopolize AGI? At this rate average citizens won't even have computers capable of running a command prompt, all devices will be like iOS consumption only. "Sorry Dave, you're not allowed to open a terminal."
- musicale 3y ago> "Sorry Dave, you're not allowed to open a terminal." No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.
- astrange 3y agoVCs don't have wealth, the people with money are called LPs or angels. I also don't know the particulars in this case, but they're usually pension funds rather than individual rich people. (Which does mean VCs are stealing from pensioners by taking a lot of fees to invest in something worse than an index fund.)
- throw14082020 3y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36511948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36511948