Courtesy of Stability AI
- Stability AI's CEO Emad Mostaque reportedly told employees they're "all going to die in 2023."
- The competition in AI is heating up with companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta in the mix.
- Mostaque's Stability AI is behind the popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion.
Stability AI's CEO warned employees about the competition heating up in the artificial intelligence industry. His message to staff: "You're all going to die in 2023."
A new Forbes report details how Emad Mostaque — who founded Stability AI, a company that creates open-source AI tools, in 2020 — is preparing to go up against fellow startup OpenAI, as well as behemoths like Google and Meta, in 2023 as tech companies race to release commercialized AI products.
In August, Stability AI released Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI text-to-image generator, to the public. According to Forbes, Stable Diffusion is used by 10 million people each day — more than the number who use OpenAI's DALL-E 2, which was released to the public in July.
"Stable Diffusion threw a bomb into the mix by making things dramatically more accessible," Pat Grady, an investor at venture capital firm Sequoia, told Forbes. "It really lit a fire under OpenAI and got them to become much more commercially focused."
Stable Diffusion uses diffusion, a generative AI technique that teaches an AI model to destroy and then reconstruct an image.
After the art generator took off, Stability AI raised a seed round of as much as $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
But it's not all smooth-sailing for the startup: Stability AI is currently facing two lawsuits, one from Getty Images and another from a group of artists, over copyright issues and "unlawful competition."
Stability isn't the only company grinding to compete in the AI race.
In December, Google issued a "code red" to employees amid the rising popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which may threaten its search engine.
Employees at the company were asked to pivot to developing AI prototypes and products that can generate art, The New York Times reported.
Meanwhile, Meta is investing more in AI to improve its advertising efforts. Meta's modeling and machine learning tools are helping the social media company find audiences for ads and also showing advertisers how many people are reacting to ads on the platform.
Read the full Forbes report here.