Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque has stepped down from the top role and the unicorn startup‘s board, the buzzy company said Friday night, making it the second trending AI startup in go through major changes this week.
Stability AI, which has been backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, has no immediate permanent replacement for the CEO role, but has appointed its chief operating officer, Shan Shan Wong, and its chief technology officer, Christian Laforte. , as interim co-CEOs. said in a blog post.
Stability AI, which has lost more than half a dozen key talent in recent quarters, said Mostaque will step down to focus on decentralized AI. In a series of posts about X, Mostaque opined that you can’t beat “centralized AI” with more “centralized AI,” referring to the ownership structure of major AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.
He also he claimed that it was his decision to leave the main position since he owned the largest number of controlling shares. “We should have more transparent and distributed governance in AI as it becomes increasingly important. Is [sic] “It is a difficult problem, but I think we can solve it…” he added. “The concentration of power in AI is bad for all of us. “I decided to resign to solve this problem at Stability and elsewhere.”
Mostaque’s departure from Stability AI, a startup known for its popular Stable Diffusion imaging tool, comes amid an ongoing fight at the startup that was spending a reported estimate of $8 million a month from October 2023, according to Bloomberg, which also noted that the startup had unsuccessfully attempted to raise new funding at a valuation of $4 billion.
Mostaque apparently wasn’t prioritizing revenue growth about a year ago. In a post on daily”. He cited several examples, including MagicLeap, which burned through billions before generating revenue.
“The benefits of proper R&D in generative AI are clearer and faster to market than almost anything we’ve seen. “It will create much more economic value than self-driving cars, for example; the total investment in it has been $100 billion without any revenue benefit,” he wrote.
His comments on Reddit last month offered insight into a change in approach. “This year we are already doing well and ahead of forecasts. Our goal is to be cash flow positive this year and I think we could achieve that sooner rather than later,” she wrote.
“The market is huge and open models will be needed for all regulated and cutting-edge industries. That’s why we’re one of the only companies to open source data, code, training execution details, and more. Custom models, consulting and more are huge markets and very reasonable business models around this as we enter enterprise adoption over the next year, last year was just a test.”
The Stability AI announcement caps an extraordinary week for the AI industry. Inflection AI, a startup that had raised about $1.5 billion, announced on Monday that two of its co-founders, as well as several other employees had joined Microsoftwho led the startup’s most recent funding round.