The CEO of the image generation AI ``Stable Diffusion'' developer publishes a blog where he refutes the report that criticizes him as a big liar

Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of

https://emad.posthaven.com/on-setting-the-record-straight

On June 4, 2023, the economic newspaper Forbes published an article criticizing Mostaque entitled ``The AI ​​founder who takes credit for the success of Stable Diffusion has a history of exaggeration.''

Stable Diffusion's AI Benefactor Has A History Of Exaggeration
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-diffusion-emad-mostaque-stability-ai-exaggeration/

As a counter-paper to this article, the sentences that Mostaque published for Stability AI employees are as follows.

We launched Stability AI with the goal of using AI to activate human potential. We saw an opportunity to positively impact industries in innovative ways by using AI to enhance scientific research, education, and the arts. This great mission has guided our work since the day we launched Stability AI.

In the race to achieve this, Stability AI will focus on its core business of developing innovative products and supporting research to implement AI in areas such as medicine, healthcare, language, imaging and music. I have left In just over 18 months, Stability AI has grown from 20 employees to over 170 employees, building a young and dynamic company that has become a leader in the AI ​​space through core team innovation and support from other teams. rice field.

It should come as no surprise to me that as our profile and influence have grown, so too have we become the target of some attacks and misinformation in the media. Forbes' article attacking us is no exception. We have been back and forth with Forbes for weeks to rectify our reporting, but Forbes apparently chose to ignore many of the issues and publish the article.

Throughout my career, I have always admired and appreciated the work of my collaborators. Also, I apologize for any mistakes I made and have always strived to improve. I have steadfastly denied any false claims or characterizations in the Forbes report, but I am here today to share the correct record with you, my dear team. All of this information was clearly communicated to Forbes prior to publication of the article.

Mostaque cites the following 11 points as false content in Forbes' report.

・About my degree at Oxford University
I didn't attend the graduation ceremony for my degree, so I don't actually have a bachelor's or master's degree. I will pay £60 next month to receive these in the mail.

・About the work at the hedge fund where I used to work
Joined Hedge Fund in 2016 as Co-Chief Investment Officer and won EM Risk-Adjusted Hedge Fund of the Year Award in 2017 for top-class portfolio construction for the full year. Did. Then in 2018, I retired from the hedge fund to focus on other things. This hedge fund went out of business due to poor performance even before I joined the company.

・Regarding efforts with the United Nations regarding the novel coronavirus infection
Stability AI partnered with the United Nations in 'Collective and Augmented Intelligence Against COVID-19 (CAIAC)' to conduct research on new coronavirus infections. However, due to multiple companies not sharing or providing the technology, Stability AI is leaving CAIAC in the summer of 2022 to focus on its core business. I have spoken about my many frustrations with CAIAC at investor meetings and in interviews.

・About Stable Diffusion
Stability AI has repeatedly announced its collaborators in the development of the first release of Stable Diffusion, alongside Computer and Vision learning groups such as LMU and Runway. Details of this collaboration have been published since its release in Stable Diffusion's Github repository maintained by CompVis and Stability AI. Additionally, 3 out of 5 Stable Diffusion authors, as you may know, work at Stability AI.

・Partnership with Amazon
Stability AI has strategic business partnerships with Amazon and AWS. As part of this strategic business partnership, AWS built a highly unusual dedicated compute cluster in August 2022 that meets the requirements of Stability AI. 4000 A100 clusters with dedicated capacity on a single spline that optimizes performance. As we scaled Stable Diffusion, we ran into some issues with payments from Stability AI to Amazon, but they were all resolved by August.

・Payment of wages and taxes for Stability AI
Although there were some cases of delayed payment of salaries, I have responded by waiting for subsidies such as government schemes and by personally paying employees' salaries. We are also paying affected employees additional wages to cover the inconvenience and cover related expenses such as overdraft fees. In addition, since the end of 2021, there have been no delays in the payment of salaries during normal operations. All tax payment issues were resolved quickly and paid in full. We are constantly working to enhance and improve all these processes.

・Efforts to strengthen and improve HR processes
Since the management change in the summer of 2022, we have continued to work to keep employee turnover low and improve the work environment. Stability AI hosts weekly town halls, anonymous feedback sessions, and other programs run by an experienced new HR team to help employees understand how Stability AI is improving. helps.

・Relationship with MidJourney
The relationship between MidJourney and Stability AI has been clarified in an investor letter. The statement reads, 'MidJourney is an independent organization that we support that implements and makes available the image generation models we create. We currently have approximately 57,000 members. , of which 14,000 are active, growing organically through subscriptions that cover computing costs after beta support, we introduced aesthetic scoring and preference learning to , we want to help you proactively extend this so that the system can be improved for each user using input from all users. The focus is not on expansion, but on making these new models accessible to as many people as possible.'

In summer 2022, we met with MidJourney to co-develop this and other products. After that, we decided to focus on the infrastructure stack by pivoting to our own development. References to MidJourney as an 'independent organization' are expressly intended to avoid misleading readers of presentation materials.

We've always been very careful about this, experimenting with different models that allow us to support the community without controlling it before settling on our current business model. The stable model is ours and it's commercial, but we're more openly supporting open source in general to keep things separate and clear.

・Zehra support
The money incurred by myself and Zehra (Mostaque's wife) as the company grew and matured was fully settled by the end of 2022 by a new experienced finance team.

・Ongoing fundraising
Stability AI is making great strides forward, but like many other startups, we continue to engage in discussions with strategic investors. At this time, we do not open the data room to investors who have signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

・About autism research
Anyone who has talked to me knows that I take this matter very seriously. We will publish more details as soon as the study builds a suitable model.

Mostaque said, ``Stability AI, which was a pre-seed startup in 2022, has expanded its scale in 2023 and is steadily growing into a multinational company.'' ``It has a hostile relationship with Stability AI. The fact that I created an article like this by interviewing people is encouraging in a way, ”he said, pointing out that this report is rooted in envy of Stability AI, which has achieved remarkable growth. .