3/25/2024: Stability.ai in Trouble?
Last Friday, Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque resigned. I wonder what will happen to the company. The company attempted to raise money at a $4B valuation early last year but the plan didn’t quite work out. Stability eventually raised $50M from Intel in November last year. According to Crunchbase, Stability has raised about ~$174M so far, which is not a lot of money for building foundational models. When Stability raised its $100M round in 2022, investors were very impressed with its technology. But now the image generation stuff seems quite commoditized. I use the ChatGPT interface to generate images these days and it’s quite good and easy to use. AI technology is advancing super fast. Today’s superstar can quickly get left in the dust tomorrow. GPU compute is also super expensive that any worthy GenAI foundational startup who wants to keep up needs to raise billions. I honestly don’t know what the landscape will look like after all the big tech and startups battle it out. Each server is like $300K with insane power usage. It’s a very expensive game only very rich companies can afford to play.