So sudden! Just today,StabilityAICEOAnnounced his resignation. EmadMostaque, no longer serves as CEO, and the company's board of directors has also withdrawn. As soon as the news came out, everyone was extremely shocked. StabilityAI is no longer stable.



It is reported that the chief operating officerShanShanWongand chief technology officerChristianLafortewill serve as interim CEO.

Earlier, Stable’s core R&D team resigned collectively.

ps. The current CTO has just been appointed, and former CTO Tom Mason’s LinkedIn has not yet been updated.



What happened to this most popular AI unicorn?

The CEO is going to open up AI

In addition to announcing the resignation of the CEO, the announcement also stated that a long-term CEO will be recruited to lead the company into the next stage of growth.

The next stop of the former CEO is not clear. He said that he will devote himself to the openness and decentralization of AI.

In the announcement, he said that he was very proud that since the introduction of the first developer, Stability has received hundreds of millions of downloads and created the best model across modalities.

I firmly believe in the mission of StabilityAI and believe that the company should be in capable hands.

The chairman of the board of directors of StabilityAI also affirmed Emad’s work:

Many thanks to Emad for his leadership and commitment to StabilityAI and open source efforts.


However, behind the "peaceful breakup", the turmoil at the top of StabilityAI goes far beyond that.

According to statistics, since March last year,At least 19 senior executives or key figures have left. The CTO has also just been replaced. It is said that with the new CTO taking office, the company's strategy may shift towards language models.

There is news that Emad’s resignation is related to the resignation of the core team and conflicts with investors.

According to Bloomberg news,As investors pressure management over company financial health, StabilityAI is considering selling the company.

The company was in early-stage talks with several companies about acquisitions last fall. And the company's senior leadership was also very turbulent last year.

It is worth mentioning that during his tenure, Emad was exposed to a lot of black material, including:

Falsifying academic qualifications/work experience, arrears of wages to employees, defrauding investors, misappropriation of public funds, etc.

And the people who broke the news were former employees. If investors are included, a total of more than 30 people made accusations.

StabilityAI co-founder Cyrus Hodes even sued Emad specifically for "fraud and embezzlement".

But we don't know whether Emad's resignation is related to this.

But what is certain is that behind this "peaceful breakup", the turmoil of StabilityAI has become apparent.

Just two days ago, former CEO Emad Mostaque personally announced at an internal plenary meeting:

StableDiffusion core research team resigned collectively.

Including research team leader and first author of the paper Robin Rombach, co-first author Andreas Blattmann, and another author Dominik Lorenz.


What happened to StabilityAI?

Much of StabilityAI's success can be directly attributed to StableDiffusion.

As mentioned earlier, StableDiffusion started as an academic research project.

Led by Professor Björn Ommer, Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz, three members of the machine vision and learning research group of the University of Munich, and researchers from Runway were completed.


Seven months after the research paper was published, StabilityAI stepped in to provide computing resources to further develop the text-to-image generation model.

StableDiffusion became popular both inside and outside the industry just one month after its official release, prompting StabilityAI to raise US$101 million in Series A financing in 2022, and its valuation quickly climbed to US$1 billion.


It is worth mentioning that StableDiffusion’s popularity is not only due to its effect, but also because of itsFree and open source.

However, it is precisely because StableDiffusion is open enough that StabilityAI's business model is not clear. In other words, you cannot make money stably.

According to previous reports from Bloomberg, the company spends at least US$8 million (approximately RMB 57 million) every month to support business operations.

"Forbes" pointed out directly: Internal documents show that StabilityAI's expenses greatly exceeded its revenue.

At the end of last year, there was news that StabilityAI was seeking a sale due to financial pressure.

According to "Business Insider", CEO Emad Mostaque also warned StabilityAI employees that the industry is highly competitive:

You will all die in 2023.


The core team suddenly resigned a few days ago, and Forbes also revealed the reason:

StabilityAl is struggling to make ends meet and cannot raise new capital.

Netizens are also worried that StableDiffusion3, which has not yet been fully opened, can still be open source?


It is worth mentioning that StabilityAI is not the only AI startup currently facing commercialization difficulties.

InflectionAI, valued at US$4 billion, is also facing disintegration.

Its CEO (DeepMind co-creator Mustafa Suleiman) and chief scientist have both gone to Microsoft to lead the newly established AI department, and have taken a large number of InflectionAI employees with them.


You know, Microsoft is an investor in InflectionAI. As long as people don't want the company, a large part of the reason should come from the current predicament that InflectionAI is encountering.

Since its establishment, InflectionAI's large models have been iterated to the 2.5th generation, and the AI ​​product PI, which focuses on personal companionship, has been launched.

But in the past three months, the average number of monthly visits to the Pi website has been less than 4 million. This means that Pi is at least outside the 50th position in global AI product traffic rankings.

And in terms of commercialization, InflectionAI has not made significant progress.


Now StabilityAI, the leading player in image generation, is also facing a dilemma...

Under the wave of large models, how to promote commercialization? is testing all startups.

The battle royale has begun.