[HN Gopher] Multiple Stability AI researchers are departing, CEO...
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Multiple Stability AI researchers are departing, CEO says
Author : ilamont
Score : 121 points
Date : 2024-03-20 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| hbrav wrote:
| This seems like a general problem for a company like this: your
| great success demonstrates that your employees are incredibly
| valuable. And sometimes businesses may say things like "our
| people are our greatest asset", but that's not actually true.
| They're not an asset. Your IP is an asset, and you own that. But
| your people are often capable of going elsewhere and producing
| equally good work, and they're likely to do that if they get a
| better offer.
| jackblemming wrote:
| So give them real ownership of the company and real fruits of
| their labor. Otherwise yea why wouldn't they go to the highest
| bidder?
| lil-grandson wrote:
| That would be ridiculous. All the upside is supposed to go to
| a small handful of people who already have more money than
| they need.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Are you talking about options?
| open592 wrote:
| It's no different than professional sports. When you win the
| super bowl for instance, the value of many of your players
| (employees) suddenly jump. At that point it's infeasible to pay
| everyone what they can realistically get on the market. Thus
| you identify and pay your most essential assets, and the others
| leave and receive huge pay bumps.
|
| I think it's very valuable for the industry, and as long as the
| teams who are picking up these employees are able to utilize
| them effectively, will result in broader innovation.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > At that point it's infeasible to pay everyone what they can
| realistically get on the market.
|
| Largely, because of salary caps created fairly explicitly to
| break the winning -> popularity -> money -> monopolizing
| talent -> winning positive feedback loop.
|
| Success feedback loops aren't quite so constrained in most
| other industries.
| entangledqubit wrote:
| With the compensation deferral setup (like Ohtani in MLB),
| I'm curious if the influence of the caps will be eroded.
| golergka wrote:
| Interesting dynamic, never thought of that.
|
| Were there instances where a sports club actually didn't want
| to win some title to prevent exactly this from happening? How
| would the sports association react if the club decided to
| throw the match for this reason?
| passion__desire wrote:
| Sumo wrestlers throwing away matches so that the other
| player can record a winning streak.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Well, I know it's not the same thing. But some sports clubs
| do try to lose so they can get a higher place in the draft
| picks.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanking_(sports)
|
| And of course when kids don't want to play during the
| summer /s
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Losing_Edge
| galoisscobi wrote:
| You assume that IP once created stands on its own. The
| programming as theory building view suggests that IP will
| degrade once people who have robust mental models about how the
| IP was created and works. So software/IP in essence has two
| critical parts that need to be there, the actual work that was
| created and robust mental models living in people's heads who
| continue to work on those projects.
|
| It also goes against the idea that programmers are replaceable
| cogs that management can change out as and when they want to.
| Filligree wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding the GP. He's not saying the
| people aren't valuable; he's saying they aren't assets. That
| is to say, they aren't property.
|
| Which isn't what 'asset' means, but it _is_ the central
| meaning; using it on people always felt squicky to me.
| kcorbitt wrote:
| In my experience this kind of mass exodus is more associated
| with failures in leadership/management than an inevitable
| result of success. For example, OpenAI has been far more
| successful than Stability and its senior employees obviously
| have lots of options, but its staff turnover ratio feels much
| smaller than Stability's.
| brandall10 wrote:
| Isn't that largely because they're all locked into comp
| structures that can net top researchers something ~$10M?
|
| I guess one could argue it's a management issue that Sam
| Altman figured out a way to structure his company to make
| that possible.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > They're not an asset. Your IP is an asset.
|
| While true for existing IP for industries like pharma, for
| industries like AI, your IP isn't worth anything unless it
| keeps evolving. If you lose your key researchers, you're done.
| stavros wrote:
| "Our people are our greatest third-party suppliers" just
| doesn't have the same ring to it.
| close04 wrote:
| The source article [0] might be a better link. The tweet (from
| the article's author himself) isn't adding anything.
|
| [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/03/20/key-
| stabl...
| jprete wrote:
| Source was posted as
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402
| ilamont wrote:
| It was paywalled for me.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Im surprised to hear they are struggling to raise money, I
| figured investors were throwing money at them.
| Filligree wrote:
| Their value proposition thus far has been "Give stuff away".
|
| I'm grateful for it, and I think they should have government
| funding if necessary -- the upsides are huge, just little of it
| goes to Stability -- but it's easy to see why investors would
| be wary.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Yeah. Every time Emad has talked about their business model
| changes I've always thought "...that's it?"
|
| I personally think they're missing some low hanging fruit,
| though I suppose it might be in the name of "safety." I
| believe Stability (maybe Clipdrop?) at least did have some
| sort of paid Lora or other training, but I tried it and it
| was awful. Considering they made the models surely they would
| have the absolute best insight into full fine tuning it and
| could roll out a service to do so.
|
| I think they talked about doing it B2B at a presumably much
| higher cost, but a consumer facing, easy to use way of doing
| it would at least pull in some money. Of course, the second
| someone uses that to train child porn or whatever they'll be
| in hot water.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Failure to monetize. (How is this going to make money? [0])
|
| 0. https://websd.mlc.ai/#text-to-image-generation-demo
|
| It's readily apparent that any sufficiently useful AI/CV/ML
| should be deployed to solve specific, immediate, niche
| problems of individual people that they're willing to pay
| small amounts of money or assign referral commissions for:
|
| - Product personal shopper-recommender goes out and crawls
| reviews and pricing to find what and where someone should buy
| something based on a prompt.
|
| - Where to live.
|
| - Where to go out.
|
| - What to have for dinner.
|
| - Find a plumber, carpenter, etc. and do open source due-
| diligence on them.
|
| - How to optimally invest money based on circumstances,
| assumptions, and speculative outcome distribution.
|
| - How to redecorate a room.
|
| In a business context, there are many classes of problems AI
| can semi-automate including:
|
| - Decision support
|
| - Feature prioritization based on support data and social
| media sentiment
|
| - Supply (inventory) and demand forecasting
|
| - Pricing optimization
| TrackerFF wrote:
| 1. Work for some prestigious ML/AI research lab / startup.
|
| 2. Identify a demand in the market.
|
| 3. Quit the lab/startup, launch your own startup.
|
| 4. Get acquired by some established AI company or FAANG tech
| megacorp.
|
| 5. Retire.
| Solvency wrote:
| You don't need to identify a demand. Just make an AI startup
| and nail the brand/marketing and you're equally likely to
| attract offers.
|
| It's a gold rush, get in now.
| CapeTheory wrote:
| So far it feels like a gold rush without much gold, just a
| lot of very expensive picks and shovels.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| And all of the shovels have Nvidia written on them
| fragmede wrote:
| Because everybody's so busy selling shovels that no one's
| digging for gold, so there's no one to sell shovels to.
|
| That's not totally true, but we're all here trying to
| outsmart one another in order to have a Sure Thing. Well
| I'm here to tell you that there are no Sure Things in life
| except for death and taxes, so take a risk, jump on a
| random plot of land, and start digging.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Up through #3, literally the playbook for the Google Research
| team (minus one who took at job at OpenAI) that authored the
| Attention is All you Need paper.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| In my old age, I have to say: this is not _just_ cynical, it is
| smart.
|
| It acts on the same dynamics companies act on. People build
| reputations by doing this with far less effort than it would
| take otherwise.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| It takes decades to figure out that playing the game under
| layers and layers of management in mega corps - is equivalent
| to undervaluing yourself.
| appplication wrote:
| Well... yes definitely. You are worth more than your
| salary, otherwise your employer wouldn't keep you around.
|
| The problem is that it's definitely a lot _easier_ to just
| cruise along, punch 40 hours, and leave work at work.
| Startup founder life is _rough_. I don't blame anyone for
| not wanting to extract that worth from themselves.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| It is not easy to cruise along in some large corps. You
| always have to be on guard about layoffs or managers
| throwing you under the bus.
|
| Not always true but it only needs to happen once to you
| for your 40 hour cruising to end. At that point, you will
| question why you spent so much time slaving away.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| There's clearly an Oceans 11 type plot here. Or perhaps The
| Producers is more apt, not sure.
| tkellogg wrote:
| wow, so easy!
| mhuffman wrote:
| billionaires hate him for this one weird trick!
| bongodongobob wrote:
| 1. Win the lottery
|
| 2. Retire
|
| Probably similar odds.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| Yeah but at least if you fail at #1 you still have a job
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| This works in finance between investment firms
| deadbabe wrote:
| Why quit? Most people will mess up #2 or execute badly on #3 or
| even then #4 is unlikely to happen when FAANGs can just copy
| you and put you out of business instead of buying you out and
| rewarding this behavior.
|
| #5 will almost certainly happen even if you keep doing #1,
| earning a huge salary.
|
| The numbers and risks just don't make sense anymore.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Why quit?
|
| ...because there's a glut of investor money chasing "AI",
| raising money for your new AI startup is not particularly
| hard if you are linked with any of the big names in AI.
|
| Even if the startup "fail", the founder could have been
| paying themselves a market-rate salary with the added
| possibility of an FU-money exit. The downsides are limited.
| deadbabe wrote:
| It's not that simple.
| golergka wrote:
| Didn't all authors of Attention is all you need do this?
| stevofolife wrote:
| What step do most find the most challenging?
|
| For me, it's the first step. It seems once you get started,
| everything else tends to fall into place more smoothly.
|
| I'm eager to know others' perspectives.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Because of the FTC, BigTech is more reticent to do an
| acquisition.
|
| So like in the case of Inflection.ai, Microsoft just did an
| acquihire of the entire team and "licensed" the technology/IP
| from what now is a shell of a company.
| robotnikman wrote:
| It makes me wonder if I should switch from my current position as
| a Java dev to something related to AI and machine learning. It
| seems that is going to be the future now, and there seems to be a
| big need for people with that knowledge right now.
| michpoch wrote:
| Yes, if you're willing to invest X years into becoming relevant
| on the AI/ML market, and you believe than in X years there will
| be still too few AI/ML specialists - then it's a great idea.
| khazhoux wrote:
| There's a huge amount of help needed in AI/ML in non-
| researcher roles (infrastructure, pipelines, testing, etc).
| I'd say that the bulk of AI/ML orgs are actually just that,
| in my experience.
|
| (I'd further argue that the number of actual "AI researchers"
| that actually contribute enough to justify their mega-million
| comp packages is small indeed... but that's a separate topic)
| robotnikman wrote:
| Infrastructure was another area I was thinking of possibly
| moving into as well, since AI of course still has to rely
| on that as well.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| yep I did an analysis on this and that's definitely where the
| software jobs are right now: https://bloomberry.com/how-ai-is-
| disrupting-the-tech-job-mar...
| digging wrote:
| Good article, thanks for posting.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Interesting Article. Looks like it would be worthwhile to
| dedicate some of my free time into specializing in AI more
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Dotcoms, then add tech (the money of Web 2.0),
| crypto/blockchain, AI/ML...
|
| If you are hearing about it, and you aren't already in, it
| might be too late.
|
| That having been said, it's a prime time to have project that
| you can bootstrap into a startup. You dont need to be google,
| you need to be google, small teams can clear a few mill a year
| with the right product and not get much larger.
| cm2187 wrote:
| AI has this difference to the other booms that the resources
| required to train a large model are out of reach of a student
| in a college dorm.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I'd say this is a "yes", and remember that there's a _ton_ of
| work that doesn 't involve actually training models. Every
| company right now has a big need for help in infrastructure,
| data pipelines, ops, monitoring + dashboards, internal tools,
| CI/CD, release management, etc.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Probably too late now. At least for this cycle.
| pksebben wrote:
| Hey now, there's a real lack of information in this tweet. Just a
| link to a paywalled article from a dodgy financial journal.
|
| This is the second time this has been referenced on the front
| page and I still don't know who they're talking about or what the
| details are (and I'm not about to give money to _forbes_ , of all
| people.)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Some more discussion on Forbes article here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402
| Jackson__ wrote:
| Interesting. It's not mentioned in the article, but the team
| behind the recently released "Stable Cascade" models has left
| stability as well.
|
| Personally, I assume stability has hit a scaling/money issue on
| image generation models, which is why they might be pivoting to
| other domains where you can still make headlines spending <$50M
| on training runs, like their 3D models.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| I mean, since we're sharing Forbes links
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-di...
|
| The CEO of Stability seems to be rather controversial person at
| the helm of a rather controversial company. I'm honestly
| surprised more people haven't left the company by now, unless
| they had some absurd incentives to stick around.
| achow wrote:
| https://archive.is/NHdKM
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Sad to hear, they really created some awesome models for the
| community. Looks like their entire diffusion team left. Do we
| know where they went to? Hopefully another organisation pops up
| without the incompetent discord based leadership and that
| actually finds a way to finance themselves while releasing
| weights in some capacity.
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