Emad Mostaque, the founder and CEO of Stability AI, has stepped down from his leadership role and the corporate's board of directors.
Stability AI is best known for its image generation tool Stable Diffusion, which has attracted quite a few controversies for copyright infringement and allows users to achieve this create illegal images.
In a preliminary move, Stability AI has appointed Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte, the corporate's COO and CTO, respectively, as co-CEOs. This was disclosed in a Current company blog post.
Mostaque said he believes within the potential of decentralized AI to combat leading centralized models that dominate the industry, from Google's Gemini to OpenAI's GPT-3.5/4 to Anthropic's Claude.
In a series of posts on social media platform X, Mostaque expressed his views on the constraints of centralized AI and criticized the operating models of leading AI startups.
“You’re not going to beat centralized AI with more centralized AI,” Mostaque explained, arguing for transparent and distributed governance in AI technology.
We won’t beat centralized AI with more centralized AI.
Understood #Decentralized AI
Much more 🔜 https://t.co/SbEF5zoo05
– Emad acc/acc (@EMostaque) March 23, 2024
“I’m proud to have led Stability to a whole lot of tens of millions of downloads and one of the best models across all modalities two years after hiring our first developer. I strongly imagine in Stability AI's mission and feel that the corporate is in capable hands. Now is the time to make sure AI stays open and decentralized,” Mostaque wrote.
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang also recently called on countries to achieve this Building sovereign AIand diverse researchers, equivalent to Yann LeCun from Meta, Check out open source AI as a method of restoring the balance of power.
Mostaque, who controlled the vast majority of Stability shares, said: “The concentration of power in AI is bad for all of us. “I actually have decided to resign to repair the issue at Stability and elsewhere.”
Stability AI's financial performance has been the topic of debate, with reports from Bloomberg in October 2023 suggesting that the corporate's monthly expenses were around $8 million. Later attempts to secure $4 billion in recent funding supposedly failed.
Stability AI, sometimes called “Instability AI,” has often been a source of controversy. They faced legal challenges, including a lawsuit from co-founder Cyrus Hodes, who accused Mostaque of fraudulent behavior.
Copyright lawsuits, including from Getty Images and several artistsThe company's practices were also scrutinized.
