How Stability AI’s Founder Tanked His Billion-Dollar Startup

I always wondered how this business model of "free and open source everything" would work out. While it's a nice sentiment it's obviously a money sink, and there's a reason basically every other attempt at monetizing AI stays behind closed doors.

But the costs associated with so much compute were now threatening to sink the company. According to an internal October financial forecast seen by Forbes, Stability was on track to spend $99 million on compute in 2023. It noted as well that Stability was “underpaying AWS bills for July (by $1M)” and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” Then there were the September and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave. (Amazon, Google and CoreWeave declined to comment.)

Jeez, and here I am just fiddling around with my own little projects on Kaggle with a budget of $0.

Edit:

Another former Stability executive was far more pointed in their assessment. “Emad is the most disorganized leader I have ever worked with in my career,” this person told Forbes. “He has no vision, and changes directions every week, often based on what he sees on Twitter.”

lmao

3 comments

"He was just giving shit away,” one former employee told Forbes. “That man legitimately wanted to transform the world. He actually wanted to train AI models for kids in Malawi. Was it practical? Absolutely not."
That's the nicest criticism of a former CEO I have ever seen.
I always wondered how this business model of "free and open source everything" would work out. While it's a nice sentiment it's obviously a money sink, and there's a reason basically every other attempt at monetizing AI stays behind closed doors.
But the costs associated with so much compute were now threatening to sink the company. According to an internal October financial forecast seen by Forbes, Stability was on track to spend $99 million on compute in 2023. It noted as well that Stability was “underpaying AWS bills for July (by $1M)” and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” Then there were the September and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave. (Amazon, Google and CoreWeave declined to comment.)
Jeez, and here I am just fiddling around with my own little projects on Kaggle with a budget of $0.
Edit:
Another former Stability executive was far more pointed in their assessment. “Emad is the most disorganized leader I have ever worked with in my career,” this person told Forbes. “He has no vision, and changes directions every week, often based on what he sees on Twitter.”
lmao
- No other ai companies are profitable either. They just have deeper pockets and don't enrich the commons,just themselves