Stability AI founder and CEO Imad Mushtaq has resigned from the top role and from the board of directors of the unicorn startup, the buzzy company said on Friday night, making it the second hot AI startup to go through major changes this week.
Stability AI, which is backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, has no immediate permanent replacement for the CEO role but has named COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as interim co-CEOs, it said in a blog post.
AI Stability, which has lost more than six key talents in recent quarters, said Mustak will step down to pursue decentralized AI. In a series of posts on
He additionally confirmed that his decision was to step down from the top position because he owned the largest number of controlling shares. “We must have more transparent and distributed governance in AI because it is becoming more important [sic] He added: “It is a difficult problem, but I believe we can solve it.” “The concentration of power in AI is bad for all of us. I decided to step down to fix this at Stability and elsewhere.
Mostaque's departure from Stability AI, a startup known for its popular image generation tool Stable Diffusion, comes amid an ongoing struggle at the startup, which was spending an estimated $8 million per month as of October 2023, according to Bloomberg, which also noted that the startup tried To no avail, he raised new financing worth $4 billion.
It appears that Mustak wasn't prioritizing revenue growth about a year ago. In a post on He cited several examples, including MagicLeap, which spent billions before generating revenue.
“The gains from R&D in sound generative AI are clearer and faster to market than anything we've seen,” he wrote. “This will create far greater economic value than, say, self-driving cars. The total investment in that has reached $100 billion.” Without any revenue.”
His comments on Reddit last month provided insight into the shift in focus. “We are doing well and ahead of expectations this year already. Our goal is to be cash flow positive this year, and I think we can get there sooner rather than later.”
“The market is huge and there will be a need for open models for the edge and all regulated industries. That's why we're one of the only companies that opens up data, code, training run details, and more. Custom models, consulting, etc. are huge markets and very sensible business models around this, as we enter In adopting institutions over the next year or so, last year was just a test.
The AI stability announcement caps off a great week for the AI industry. Inflection AI, a startup that has raised about $1.5 billion, announced Monday that two of its co-founders as well as several other employees have joined Microsoft, which led the startup's latest funding round.
