Stability AI CEO Resigns, Says We Can't Beat Centralized AI With More Centralized AI (techcrunch.com) 10
Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the top role and the unicorn startup's board, the buzzy firm said. From a report: Stability AI, which has been backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, doesn't have an immediate permanent replacement for the CEO role but has appointed its COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as interim co-CEOs, it said in a blog post. Stability AI, which has lost more than half a dozen key talent in recent quarters, said Mostaque is stepping down to pursue decentralized AI. In a series of posts on X, Mostaque opined that one can't beat "centralized AI" with more "centralized AI," referring to the ownership structure of top AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
In related news (Score:2)
Lightspeed Venture Partners has announced a pivot away from AI, over to apparel. Their first product will be mens' underwear... Lightspeed Brand Briefs.
They haven't started production yet, but they've already released a commercial [youtu.be].
Re: (Score:2)
Confused (Score:2)
Did he get confused about the technology when he wanted to be head of an AI startup and confuse it with blockchains?
Because that's what it sounds like.
You fundamentally can not have a "distributed (gen)AI". The technology doesn't exist, because it can't exist by nature of how GenAI works, and how you train the models.
Re:Confused (Score:5, Informative)
Stability AI believes that releasing open models and letting the community hack at them is the path forward. They do indeed have a distributed model where you can essentially overlay custom training on top of the base model. They have some thing that allows you to fine-tune the model with a fraction of the resources that it requires to do the same thing with OpenAI's models. This is why there has been an explosion of image generation models based on Stable Diffusion. It's super easy to fork it and make a custom one. You can't download GPT-4's model and just hack at it.
I assume that the company is switching to a different direction which is why he is resigning? This sounds a lot like the early internet days when things were open and hackable. But big money investors want profitable payoff, not cool democratized technology that anybody can use. Investors want lock-in.
Re: (Score:2)
^^ This.
Re: Confused (Score:3)
For the sake of clarity, "they have something...to allow you to fine tune... with less resources" is not really a technological breakthrough. Just means "they allow you to fine tune on your own resources... at all".
But this is the most likely explanation, and I would not be surprised if the quote predated the change in leadership.
Fwiw, its not clear that Stability AI has been *intentionally* decentralized all this time.
They were among the first to release their models for download right on time for the earl
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the clarification, I just kinda had a general idea. Your "..." additions are exactly how I was thinking as I wrote it.
decentralized AI (Score:3)
I hadn't ever heard about it so I searched for a few articles. Having an alternative to the exclusive ownership of the most powerful AI by a handful of megacorps is a worthy objective. I don't know if it is technically plausible.
https://builtin.com/articles/d... [builtin.com]
"Decentralized AI also provides checks against mass surveillance and manipulation by governments or corporations. Centralized control enables advanced AI utilization against citizen interests on massive scales. But decentralized AI limits this avenue of oppression."
Does it really do that?
Re: (Score:2)