IBL News | New York
Stability AI Founder and CEO Emad Mostaque stepped down from his role, the company announced on Friday. COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte were appointed as interim co-CEOs, it said in a blog post.
Mostaque’s departure comes amid an ongoing struggle at the startup that was spending a reported estimate of $8 million a month as of October 2023, according to Bloomberg, which also noted that the startup had unsuccessfully attempted to raise new funding at a $4 billion valuation.
The move followed months of tensions with major investors like Coatue Management, who called for Mostaque to step down.
Emad Mostaque [in the picture above] said that he decided to resign to fix the concentration of power on his Board as he held the most number of controlling shares.
“We should have more transparent & distributed governance in AI as it becomes more and more important. It’s a hard problem, but I think we can fix it,” he added.
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As my notifications are RIP some notes:
1. My shares have majority of vote @StabilityAI
2. They have full board controlThe concentration of power in AI is bad for us all
I decided to step down to fix this at Stability & elsewhere
Will be sharing more soon
Exciting times https://t.co/rknp5lCWh4
— Emad acc/acc (@EMostaque) March 23, 2024
Backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue Management, Stability AI, a startup known for its image generation tool Stable Diffusion, has lost more than half a dozen key talent in recent quarters.
Recently, Stability AI released Stable Video 3D (SV3D), a gen AI video tool for rendering 3D video.
SV3D is available for commercial use with a Stability AI Professional Membership ($20 per month for creators and developers with less than $1 million in annual revenue). For non-commercial purposes, users can download the model weights from Hugging Face.
