[HN Gopher] Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
___________________________________________________________________
Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI
Author : ed
Score : 447 points
Date : 2024-03-23 03:33 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stability.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (stability.ai)
| quantumwoke wrote:
| Huge news, and his reasoning doesn't seem to make sense to me.
| Can anyone elaborate further?
| minimaxir wrote:
| There have been a series of high profile staff/researcher
| departures, implied to be partially as a result of Emad's
| leadership. The latest departures of the researchers who helped
| develop Stable Diffusion could be fatal:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39768402
| minimaxir wrote:
| He's leaving to work on _decentralized_ AI? That 's exactly what
| Stability AI was doing before it became clear the economics no
| longer work out in practice, and starting a new company wouldn't
| change that. (Emad is an advisory board member to a decentralized
| GPU company, though: https://home.otoy.com/stabilityai/ )
|
| Obviously this is the polite way to send him off given the latest
| news about his leadership, but this rationale doesn't track.
| nextworddev wrote:
| I'm guessing Emad sees the "rationale" in the recent revival of
| crypto prices - and the subsequent demand for altcoins
| tarruda wrote:
| AI + Crypto bull market is a recipe for grabbing tons of VC
| money
| ctrw wrote:
| Think seti at home.
|
| Instead of wasting all the compute on bitcoin we pretrain fully
| open models which can run on people's hardware. A 120b ternary
| model is the most interesting thing in the world. No one can
| train one now because you need a billion dollar super computer.
| __loam wrote:
| I would expect most of the big tech firms have the capital to
| build a gpu cluster like that.
| kleinsch wrote:
| People are estimating that Meta is buying $8-10B in GPUs this
| year alone.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/01/18/mark-zuckerberg-
| indicate...
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah, certainly within an order of magnitude of that
| number.
| Tubbe wrote:
| Yeah, but they are also doing an insane amount of inference
| and continuously experimenting with developing new sota
| models.
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| Transmission speeds aren't fast enough for this, unless you
| crank up the batch size ridiculously high.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| LoRA training/merging basically is "crank up the batch size
| ridiculously high" in a nutshell, right? What actually
| breaks when you do that?
| brrrrrm wrote:
| Cranking up the batch size kills convergence.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Wonder if that can be avoided by modifying the training
| approach. Ideas offhand: group by topic, train a subset
| of weights per node; figure out which layers have the
| most divergence and reduce lr on those only.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| SETI made sense because there is a lot of data where you
| download chunk and do expensive computation and return thin
| result.
|
| Model training is unlike that. It's large state that is
| constantly updated and updates require full, up to date
| state.
|
| This means you cannot distribute it efficiently over slow
| network with many smaller workers.
|
| That's why NVIDIA is providing scalable clusters with
| specialized connectivity so they have ultra low latency and
| massive throughput.
|
| Even in those setups it takes ie. a month to train base
| model.
|
| Converted to distributed setup this same task would take
| billions of years - ie. it's not feasible.
|
| There aren't any known ways of contributing computation
| without access to the full state. This would require
| completely different architecture, not only "different than
| transformers" but "different than gradient descent", which
| would be basically creating new branch in machine learning
| and starting from zero.
|
| Safe bet is on "ain't going to happen" - better to focus on
| current state of art and keep advancing it until it builds
| itself and anything else we can dream of to reach this
| "mission fucking accomplished".
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| That's wrong. What you described is data parallelism and it
| would indeed be very tricky to e.g. sync gradients across
| machines. But this is not the only method of training
| neural nets (transformers or any other kind) in parallel.
| If we'd like to train, say, a human brain complexity level
| model with 10^15 parameters, we'd need a model parallelism
| approach anyways. It introduces a bit of complexity since
| you need to make sure that each distributed part of the
| model can run individually with roughly the same amount of
| compute, but you no longer need to worry about syncing
| anything (or have the entire state of anything on one
| machine). The real questions is if you can find enough
| people to run this who will never be able to run it
| themselves in the end, because inference alone will still
| require a supercluster. If you have access to that, you
| might as well train something on it today.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Lack of data parallelism is implied by computation that
| is performed.
|
| You gradient descend on your state.
|
| Each step needs to work on up to date state otherwise
| you're computing gradient descend from state that doesn't
| exist anymore and your computed gradient descent delta is
| nonsensical if applied to the most recent state (it was
| calculated on old one, direction that your computation
| calculated is now wrong).
|
| You also can't calculate it without having access to the
| whole state. You have to do full forward and backward
| pass and mutate weights.
|
| There aren't any ways of slicing and distributing that
| make sense in terms of efficiency.
|
| The reason is that too much data at too high frequency
| needs to be mutated and then made readable.
|
| That's also the reason why nvidia is focusing so much on
| hyper efficient interconnects - because that's the
| bottleneck.
|
| Computation itself is way ahead of in/out data transfer.
| Data transfer is the main problem and going in the
| direction of architecture that dramatically reduces it by
| several orders of magnitude is just not the way to go.
|
| If somebody solves this problem it'll mean they solved
| much more interesting problem - because it'll mean you
| can locally uptrain model and inject this knowledge into
| bigger one arbitrarily.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Your gradient descent is an operation on a directed
| acyclic graph. The graph itself is stateless. You can do
| parts of the graph without needing to have access to the
| entire graph, particularly for transformers. In fact this
| is already done today for training and inference of large
| models. The transfer bottleneck is for currently used
| model sizes and architectures. There's nothing to stop
| you from building a model so complex that compute itself
| becomes the bottleneck rather than data transfer. Except
| its ultimate usability of course, as I already mentioned.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Your DAG is big. It's stateless for single pass. Next one
| doesn't operate on it anymore, it operates on new,
| updated one from previous step. It has fully connected
| sub DAGs.
|
| There is nothing stopping you from distributing
| assembly/machine code for CPU instructions, yet nobody
| does it because it doesn't make sense from performance
| perspective.
|
| Or amazon driving truck from one depo to other to unload
| one package at a time to "distribute" unloading because
| "distributing = faster".
| ajb wrote:
| Openai had a more distributable algorithm:
| https://openai.com/research/evolution-strategies
|
| But given that they don't seem to have worked on it
| since, I guess it wasn't too successful. But maybe there
| is a way
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Yes, if there was something interesting there you'd think
| since 2017 something would happen. Reinforcement Learning
| (that is compared with) is not particularly famous for
| its performance (it is it's biggest issue and reason for
| not being used that much). Also transformers don't use it
| at all.
| mejutoco wrote:
| That is the challenging part indeed.
|
| But if we think of mixture of experts models outperforming
| "monolithic" models, why not? Maybe instead of 8 you can do
| 1000 and that is easy to paralellize. It sounds worth
| exploring to me.
| l33tman wrote:
| I think the MoE models are trained together just like any
| other network though, including the dispatcher layer that
| has to learn which "expert" route each token to. Perhaps
| you could do some kind of technically worse model
| architecture that is trained separately and then a more
| complex dispatcher that then learns to utilize the
| individually trained experts as best as it can?
| nabakin wrote:
| I don't think MoE allows for that either. You'd have to
| come up with a whole new architecture that allows parts
| to be trained independently and still somehow be merged
| together in the end.
| nsagent wrote:
| This paper addresses that issue and allows fully
| independent training of the experts:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14177
| tkgally wrote:
| This one, from a couple of days ago, might address that
| issue as well:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13187
| mirekrusin wrote:
| This approach works on merging finetunes.
|
| Base model was still trained in usual, non distributed
| way (by far the most cost).
|
| Fine tunes were also trained in usual, non distributed
| way.
|
| Proposed approach tries out several combinations to pick
| one that seems to perform better (where combination means
| ie. adhoc per layer operation).
|
| Merging is not distributed as well.
|
| There is not much distribution happening overall beyond
| the fact that fine tunes were trained independently.
|
| Taking weight averages, weighted weight averages,
| trimming low diffs, doing arithmetic (subtracting base
| model from fine tune) etc. are all ad hoc trials throwing
| something on the wall and seeing what sticks the most.
| None of those work well.
|
| For distributed training to work we'd have to have better
| algebra around this
| multidimentional/multilayer/multiconnectivity state. We
| don't have it and it has many problems, ie. evaluation is
| way too expensive. But solving "no need to rerun through
| whole training/benchmark corpus to see if my tiny change
| is better or not" problem will mean we solved problem of
| extracting essence of intelligence. If we do that, then
| hyper-efficient data centers will still keep beating out
| any distributed approach and it's all largely irrelevant
| because that's pure AGI already.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I wouldn't call peer network of 8 "distributed learning"
| in the sense we're talking about here.
| nsagent wrote:
| You're right that parameter updates typically require full
| state, but during my PhD I've explored some possibilities
| to address this limitation (unfortunately, my ideas didn't
| pan out in the time I had). That said, there is research
| that has explored this topic and made some progress, such
| as this paper:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14177
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Unfortunately it's hardly progress. MoE expert models are
| still large, have to be trained in usual, linear way,
| this approach requires training set classification
| upfront, each expert model is completely independent,
| each has to relearn concepts, your overall model is as
| good as dedicated expert, scale is in low numbers ie. 8,
| not thousands (otherwise you'd have to run inference on
| beefed up cluster only, experts still have to be loaded
| when used) etc.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Reminded me of Petals offering distributed ML inference
| anyone tried this?
|
| https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| For the record, this already exists in the open source world
| for Stable Diffusion.
|
| https://stablehorde.net/
|
| You can host a local horde and do "Seti at home" for stable
| diffusion.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| "Decentralised" AI probably means something to do with crypto.
| Like mint this ocin to get access to that model? That's my
| guess.
| hsjsbeebue wrote:
| Like "here is a rug" let me pull it for you!
| kalkr wrote:
| decentralization != coinshit
| malthaus wrote:
| but now that the crypto boys are back en vogue and are
| returning from hibernation / ai-vacations due to price
| levels you can combine 2 hype trends into one and capture
| the imagination & wallets of 2 intersecting circles of
| fools!
|
| so if these days someone is talking about decentralized
| anything i'd bet it involves coinshit again
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emad_Mostaque
|
| Read his Wikipedia page and tell me he doesn't sound like
| your run of the mill crypto scammer.
|
| > He claims that he holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in
| mathematics and computer science from the University of
| Oxford.[7][8] However, according to him, he did not attend
| his graduation ceremony to receive his degrees, and
| therefore, he does not technically possess a BA or an
| MA.[7]
| chasd00 wrote:
| Pretty simple background check would answer that
| question. If he's claiming those credentials without
| actually having them I would assume it be common
| knowledge by now.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Someone became a US House Rep while lying about an
| education they did not have and a completely falsified
| resume. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that if he was
| lying everyone would know by now.
| evilduck wrote:
| In the US attending your graduation ceremony has zero
| bearing on whether the university recognizes if you
| achieved a degree or not. Is the UK or Oxford different
| in this regard? Who cares if someone attended a ceremony.
| This sounds fraudulent at first glance. People with legit
| credentials don't need to add technicalities to their
| claim.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Kinda like Deltec's "Deputy CEO"? (Tether's bank), or
| even Deltec itself:
|
| At the start of 2021, according to their website, it was
| a 55 year old bank. By the end of 2021, it was a 70 year
| old bank!
|
| The bank's website is a WordPress site. And their
| customers must be unhappy - online banking hasn't worked
| for nearly two years at this point.
|
| Anyway, their Deputy CEO gave this hilarious interview
| from his gaming rig. A 33 year old Deputy CEO, who by his
| LinkedIn claimed to have graduated HEC Lausanne in
| Switzerland with a Master of Science at the age of 15...
| celebrating his graduation by immediately being named
| Professor of Finance at a university in Lebanon. While
| dividing his spare time between running hedge funds in
| Switzerland and uhh... Jacksonville, FL.
|
| The name of his fund? Indepedance [sic] Weath [sic]
| Management. Yeah, okay.
|
| In this hilariously inept interview, he claimed that
| people's claims about Deltec's money movements being
| several times larger than all the banking in their
| country was due to them misunderstanding the country's
| two banking licenses, the names of which he "couldn't
| remember right now" (the Deputy CEO of a bank who can't
| remember the name of banking licenses), and he "wasn't
| sure which one they had, but we _might_ have both ".
|
| Once the ridicule and all this started piling on, within
| 24 hours, he was removed from the bank's website
| leadership page. When people pointed out how suspicious
| that looked, he was -re-added-.
|
| The bank then deleted the company's entire website and
| replaced it with a minimally edited WordPress site, where
| most of the links and buttons were non-functional and
| remained so for months thereafter.
|
| I mean fuck it, if the cryptobros want to look at all
| that and say "seems legit to me", alright, let em.
| gbear605 wrote:
| I didn't go to Oxford, but going to your graduation
| ceremony isn't usually a requirement for possessing a BA.
| The university just mails your diploma to you.
| hanniabu wrote:
| If you want sustainability it does
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| A few years ago it was all about democratized AI
| seydor wrote:
| using old nvidia cards as space heaters
| moneycantbuy wrote:
| what's the real reason?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The most obvious potential real reason is Stability isn't
| making money, and the people that matter don't think Emad was
| going to be able to turn it around.
| trickstra wrote:
| Well, that means his replacement will be a money shark,
| enshittyfying Stability AI for higher profits.
| anonylizard wrote:
| There's nothing to enshitify, their models were open
| sourced. Now they may no longer release future models for
| free, but its entitlement to think we'll just get free
| improvements forever.
|
| Also not all CEO replacements turn out bad. Uber certainly
| has turned itself around.
| cybernoodles wrote:
| Maybe related to last years controversy?
|
| "Mostaque had embezzled funds from Stability AI to pay the rent
| for his family's lavish London apartment" and that Hodes learned
| that he "had a long history of cheating investors in prior
| ventures in which he was involved"
| joegibbs wrote:
| It also seems like the company just isn't doing very well, it
| looks like there have been constant problems since Stable
| Diffusion was released - not enough funding, people leaving,
| etc. Which I don't get - you create a massive new piece of
| software that is a huge leap forward and you can't just get
| more funding? There have to be big structural issues at
| Stability.
| yreg wrote:
| > not enough funding
|
| They have raised 110M in October.
| joegibbs wrote:
| Yet for the 6 months before that they were talking about
| running out of money, and even the month after they got
| funded were considering selling the company due to money
| issues.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| I'm practicality shaking my head in disbelief at all the red
| flags this guy has and people are still defending him.
| Stability and its work are great. We should support an open
| community and ethos. And Emad can still be a shady narcissist
| con man. These are all compatible views.
| xyst wrote:
| The "wework" ceo of ai bubble
| ed wrote:
| A lot more social good with this one though. Hard to cheer for
| Stability.ai's failure.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Wework transferred investor money to office building owners and
| the CEO himself.
|
| Stability transferred investor money to countless AI users in
| the world. Emad certainly didn't get a billion dollar payday.
| echelon wrote:
| Stability models are mostly open source. While it was never
| going to last, Stability put the entire industry in a race to
| the bottom, all the while building up the open ecosystem.
| rvz wrote:
| Looks like many AI startups are experiencing a bit of some
| turbulence and chaos in the recent months:
|
| First the OpenAI rebellion in November, then the Inflection AI
| acqui-hire from Microsoft not willing to pay the over-valued $4B
| and deflected that to $600M instead (after making $0 revenue) and
| now a bit of in-stability at Stability AI with the CEO resigning
| after many employees leaving.
|
| What does that say about the other AI companies out there who
| have raised tons of VC cash and aren't making any meaningful
| amount of revenue? I guess that is contributing to the collapse
| of this bubble with only a very few companies surviving.
| __loam wrote:
| Wait you're telling me you can't make the next trillion dollar
| industry by incinerating capital while making no money?
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| You have a point, but remember Amazon and Google did exactly
| that and figured out the business model later.
| __loam wrote:
| Surely the same strategy will work during economic
| contraction and a period of high interest rates and
| borrowing costs.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Big difference is that Amazon and Google had fast growing
| revenue
| bamboozled wrote:
| I am quite sure Google had a lot to offer from day one,
| which is why they were encouraged to start the business.
| There wasn't any open source Google's.
|
| Yes maybe the business model wasn't perfect but ad revenue
| was already well and truly a thing by the time Google
| invented a better search engine. All they had to do was
| serve the ads and the rest is history.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| this seems super misleading
|
| Amazon nailed high revenue growth from the very beginning,
| just reinvesting in growth & deferring the margin story.
| They could have stopped at any time.
|
| Google nailed high traffic from the beginning, so ad sales
| was always a safe Plan B. The founders hoped to find
| something more aesthetic to them, failed, and the
| conservative path worked.
|
| The reason I write this is misleading is b/c this is very
| different from a ZIRP YC era thinking that seems in line
| with your suggestion:
|
| - Ex: JustinTV used their VC $ to pivot into Twitch, and if
| that didn't work, game over.
|
| - Ex: Uber raised bigger & bigger VC rounds until self-
| driving cars could solve their margins / someone else
| figured it out. They seem to be figuring out their margins,
| but it was a growing disaster and unclear if they could
| with such an unpredictable miracle.
|
| In contrast, both Amazon & Google were in positions of huge
| cash flows and being able to switch to highly profitable
| growth at any time. They were designed to control their
| destinies, vs have bankers/VCs dictate them.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Amazon was ruthless at making money from day 0.
|
| Amazon was famous for not taking profit, and instead
| putting profit back into the company, but revenue? Amazon
| was generating gobs and gobs and gobs of revenue from day
| 0.
| d-z-m wrote:
| > OpenAI rebellion
|
| This phrasing makes me feel like we're living in some techno-
| future where corporations are de-facto governance apparatuses,
| squashing rebellion and dissidents :^)
| jprete wrote:
| Colonial companies did this all the time, e.g. the British
| East India Company, and the 1800s American railroads had the
| Pinkertons. There's also the phenomenon of the company town.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Well RIP Stability AI.
|
| I love their models and I love how they have changed the entire
| open source AI ecosystem for the better, but the writing was
| always on the wall for them given how unprofitable they are.
|
| I don't think much of the AI startup scene or socials groups like
| e/acc would have existed if it weren't for the tech that they
| just gave away for free.
|
| Its interesting how Stability AI and their VC funding have done a
| much better job of acting effectively as a non-profit charity
| (because they don't have profits. lol) to speed up AI development
| and open source their results as compared to other companies that
| were supposed to have been doing that from the beginning.
|
| They really were the true ActuallyOpenAI.
|
| Related to this, if you are an aspiring person who wants to
| improve the world, tricking a bunch of VC investors to fund your
| tech and then giving away the results to everyone free of charge
| is the single best way to do it.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > socials groups like e/acc
|
| Good riddance.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Hey, let me know when the doomers have built anything that
| has mattered because they choose to, and not because they are
| forced to my market forces.
|
| At least the open source AI people have code that you can
| use, freely without restriction.
|
| The doomers, on the other hand, don't do anything but try and
| fail to prevent other people from releasing useful stuff.
|
| But, in some sense I should be thanking the doomers because I
| rather that people with such incompetence were the enemy as
| opposed to people who might have a chance of succeeding.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Not being e/acc doesn't make one a doomer. It means being
| someone with a healthy relationship with technological
| progress, who hasn't given up on the prospect of useful
| regulation where it's helpful.
|
| The US is great but the best AI researchers aren't gonna
| want to live here if it becomes a hyper libertarian
| hellscape. They want to raise a family without their kids
| being exploited by technologies in ways that e/accs tell us
| we should just accept. It's not sustainable.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > if it becomes a hyper libertarian hellscape.
|
| Releasing cool open source AI tech doesn't turn the world
| into a libertarian hellscape.
|
| You are taking the memes way too seriously.
|
| Mostly people just joke around on twitter while are also
| building tech startups. e/acc isn't overthrowing the
| government.
| jrflowers wrote:
| >You are taking the memes way too seriously.
|
| Exactly. There are two groups of people: ones that defend
| Effective Accelerationism online with a straight face,
| and ones that take memes too seriously
| janalsncm wrote:
| You may want to read Marc Andreessen's manifesto. E/acc
| isn't just about "releasing cool AI tech".
|
| It means unrestricted technological progress.
| Unrestricted, including from annoying things like
| consumer protection, environmental concerns, or even
| national security.
|
| If e/acc was just about making cool open source stuff and
| posting memes on the Internet, you wouldn't need a new
| term for it, that's what people have been doing for the
| past 30 years.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Ok, thats nice and all. But the actual results of all of
| this is memes and people making cool startups.
|
| Regardless of whether a couple people who are taking
| their own jokes too seriously truly believe that they are
| going to, I don't know, create magic AGI, the fact
| remains that the actual measurable results of all this is
| only:
|
| 1: funny memes
|
| 2: cool AI startups
|
| Anything other than that is made up stuff in either your
| head, or the heads of people who just want to pump up the
| valuation of their startups.
|
| > Marc Andreessen's manifesto
|
| Yes, I'm sure he says a lot of things that will convince
| people to invest in companies that he also invests in. It
| is an effective marketing tactic. I'm sure he has
| convinced other VCs to invest in his companies because of
| these marketing slogans.
|
| But regardless of what a couple people say to hype up
| their startup investments, that is unrelated to the
| actual real world outcomes of all of this.
|
| > you wouldn't need a new term for it
|
| The fact that me and you are talking about it, actually
| proves that yes some marketing terms both make a
| difference and also don't result in, I don't know, the
| government being overthrown and replaced by libertarian
| VCs or whatever nonsense that people are worried about.
| nojvek wrote:
| If Marc writes something it doesn't become the definition
| of e/acc. Marc is hyperbolic and he gets a lot of clicks
| and eyeballs. As a VC though, he does it for his
| interest.
|
| E/acc has many interpretations. In the most basic sense
| it means "technology accelerates growth". One should work
| on better technology and making it widely distributed.
| Instead of giving away money, one can have the biggest
| impact on humanity with e/acc.
|
| we've been effectively accelerating for the past 200
| years.
|
| Nothing hyper libertarian there.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| "Let me know when the people who think AI will destroy the
| world actually build cool AI toys for me to play with."
|
| Yeah uh.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Are you aware of smth called criminal code? This is one of the
| worst advices I've ever seen. Tricking people to obtain money?
| How's this not fraud?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > This is one of the worst advices I've ever seen.
|
| Really? Because stability AI caused a very large amount of
| good in the world.
|
| It arguably kicked off the entire AI startup industry.
|
| > Tricking people to obtain money? How's this not fraud?
|
| Its not fraud because you don't have to lie to anyone. You
| can tell VCs exactly what you plan on doing. Which is to open
| source all of your code... and... uhhh... yeah that will
| totally make the company valuable.
|
| There are lots of ways of making sales pitches about open
| source, or similar, that will absolutely pass regulatory
| scrutiny and are "honest", and yet still have no hope of
| commercial success and also provide a huge amount of value to
| the public. Like what stability AI did.
| samatman wrote:
| The crux is that I doubt they intended this.
|
| A company that sets out to obtain VC money and blow it all
| on open source software without turning a profit, is going
| to leave behind smoking guns. Those will turn up in
| discovery and make one's life rather difficult.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > The crux is that I doubt they intended this.
|
| Sure they did. They have been open from the start that
| they were releasing everything open source. They have
| been very up front about that!
|
| > is going to leave behind smoking guns. Those will turn
| up in discover
|
| No it won't, and it didn't. The VCs all hopped on board
| onto a very transparent open source giveaway. Good on
| them! Nobody lied to anyone about their open source
| plans.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Huggingface are also the real actual openAI
| abi wrote:
| How? What models have they put out that are relevant?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Zephyr: https://huggingface.co/HuggingFaceH4/zephyr-7b-beta
|
| Their platform for easy distribution and management of
| models has sped up the ecosystem more so.
| Satam wrote:
| The underlying reason is that current AI businesses and models
| are failing to capture any significant economic value. We're
| going to get there, but it will take some more work. It won't be
| decades, but a few more years would be helpful
| minimaxir wrote:
| AI businesses/models are capturing economic value: the problem
| is that costs are increasing much faster than revenue.
| dheera wrote:
| No, Stability isn't getting 99.99% of the money people are
| making from Stable Diffusion. Their (lack of a) business
| model is the problem.
| Satam wrote:
| With the current limitations of AI in mind, it often looks
| like a solution looking for a problem. It's too unreliable,
| slow, dumb, and too expensive for a lot of the tasks
| companies would like to use it for.
|
| And that becomes part of the problem because it's hard to
| sell unreliable technology unless you design the product in a
| way that plays well with the current shortcomings. We will
| get there, but it's still a few iterations away.
| BigJono wrote:
| I don't think it's that SD and LLMs are solutions looking
| for problems, it's that there are very clear problems to
| which they provide 90% of a solution and make it impossible
| to clear the last 10%.
|
| They're the new WYSIWYG/low-code. Everyone that doesn't
| fully understand the problem space thinks they're some
| ultimate solution that is going to revolutionise
| everything. People that do are responding with a resounding
| 'meh'.
|
| Stable Diffusion is a great example. Something that can
| generate consistent game assets would be an absolute game
| changer for the entire game industry and open up a new wave
| of high tech indie game development, but despite every "oh
| wow" demo hitting the front page of HN, we've had the tech
| for a couple of years now and the only thing that's come
| out of it is some janky half solutions (3D meshes from
| pictures that are unworkable in real games, still no way to
| generate assets in consistent styles without a huge amount
| of complex tinkering) and a bunch of fucking hentai lol.
| roenxi wrote:
| A game with no consistency in the art is probably
| enabled. We've crossed the threshold where something like
| Magic the Gathering could be recreated by a tiny team and
| a low budget.
|
| I don't think the limiting factor here is the software;
| it looks like we got AI-generated art pretty much as soon
| as consumer graphics cards could handle it (10 years ago
| it would have been quite hard). I'd be measuring progress
| in hardware generations not years and from that
| perspective Stable Diffusion is young.
| callalex wrote:
| Current AI is entirely incapable of generating the
| balanced and fun/engaging rule sets required for a MtG
| style game. Sure the art assets could be generated with
| skilled prompting and touchup but even that is nowhere
| close to the strong statement you made.
| VladimirGolovin wrote:
| OP likely meant that a Midjourney-level AI can easily
| generate all the card art.
|
| Obviously, current AIs cannot generate game rulesets
| because the game feel is an internal phenomenon that
| cannot be represented in the material domain and
| therefore AIs cannot train on it.
| liuliu wrote:
| Palworld
| livueta wrote:
| And even a lot of the hentai is fucking worthless for the
| same reasons! Try generating some kinbaku. It's really
| hard to get something where all the rope actually
| connects and interacts sensibly because it doesn't
| actually know what a knot is. Instead, you end up with M.
| C. Escher: Fetish Edition.
| GaggiX wrote:
| The NovelAI V3 model is really good at this, shibari and
| related stuff, it's a heavily finetuned SDXL model.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Yeah not sure what you're talking about. Pony diffusion
| and conteolnet can fix most of the issues you're
| describing
| skydhash wrote:
| Human work is much more deterministic than AI as it
| encompasses a lot more constraints than what the task
| specified. If you take concept art creations, while the
| brief may be a few sentences, the artist knows to respect
| anatomy and perspective rules, as well as some common
| definitions (when the brief says ship, you know that it's
| the ship concept approved last week). As an artist, I've
| used reference pictures, dolls, 3d renders and one of the
| most aspect these tools had was consistency. I don't see
| Large Models be consistent without another models
| applying constraint to what they're capable of producing,
| like rules defining correct anatomy and extracting data
| that defines a character. The fact is we do have tools
| like MakeHuman [0], Marvelous Designer [1], and others
| that let you generate ideas that are consistent in their
| flexibility.
|
| I look at Copilot and it's been the same for me. I'm
| either working on a huge codebase and most of the time,
| it means tweaking and refactoring, which is not something
| I trust a LLM with. Or it's a greenfield project and I
| usually write only the necessary code for a task and
| boilerplate generation is not a thing for me. Coding for
| me is like sculpting and LLM-based solutions feel like
| trying to do with bricks attached to my feet. You can get
| something working if you're patient enough, but it's make
| more sense and it's more enjoyable to just use your
| fingers.
|
| [0]: http://www.makehumancommunity.org/
|
| [1]: https://marvelousdesigner.com/
| qp11 wrote:
| Pretty much what happened with Speech Recognition for 30
| years. That last 10% had to be handled manually. Even if
| you get 90% right, it still means ever second sentence
| has issues. And as things scale up the costs of all that
| manual behind the scenes hacking scale up too. We
| underestimated how many issues involved Ambiguity - where
| N people see the same thing and have N different
| interpretations. So you see a whole bunch of Speech Rec
| companies rising and falling over time.
|
| Now things are pretty mature, but it took decades to get
| there but there is still a whole bunch of hacks upon
| hacks behind the scenes. Same story will repeat with each
| new problem domain.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| We use Whisper for automatic translation, supposedly
| SotA, but we have to fix its output, I would say, very
| often. It repeats things, translates things for no
| reason, has trouble with numbers.. it's improved in leaps
| and bounds but I'd say that speech recognition doesn't
| seem to be there yet.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| (Can't edit anymore, but I meant "automatic
| transcription" above..)
| tiborsaas wrote:
| We use AI for simple tasks and it already pays off. It's
| not unreliable if you do it right.
| echelon wrote:
| No. There can be tremendous value in AI, you just won't find it
| here.
|
| The reason is that Stability.ai gave away everything _for
| free_. Until recently, they didn 't even attempt to charge
| money for their models.
|
| I've heard the only reason they're not already closed up is
| that they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota they leased
| out years ago. Companies are subletting from Stability, which
| locked in lots of long term GPU processing capacity.
|
| There's no business plan here. This is the Movie Pass of AI.
| __loam wrote:
| It will be interesting to see when OpenAI gets as open about
| their costs as their revenue.
| yreg wrote:
| > the only reason they're not already closed up is that
| they're reselling all of the rented GPU quota
|
| They have raised 110M in October and they say that training a
| particular model costs them hundreds of thousands $ in
| compute costs.
|
| They don't lack money.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| They needed to take an emergency $50M loan after that, so
| it clearly didn't last long
| huytersd wrote:
| OpenAI and midjourney have millions of paying customers.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Tens of millions of freeloaders too.
| rvz wrote:
| ...and thousands of enterprise customers translating into
| billions of dollars worth of deals.
|
| The point is, OpenAI can afford to have free-loaders as
| long as their deals from enterprise, governments are paying
| for the service.
|
| Midjourney doesn't have a free plan so no free-loaders
| there and they're making $200M+ with no VCs.
|
| Stability.ai will always suffer from free-loaders due to
| their fully open source AI.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Stability.ai will always suffer from free-loaders due
| to their fully open source AI.
|
| Stability's recent models (SD3, SV3D, StableLM2,
| StableCode, and more) are neither open licensed nor
| planned for release as open licensed.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Sounds like a fairly precarious position they're in
| though. This isn't some new magic tech anymore.
| raincole wrote:
| Every single Ad blocker users is a freeloader to
| Google/Youtube.
|
| Didn't stop them from being extremely successful.
| necovek wrote:
| I am both a Youtube Family Premium and a dedicated ad-
| blocker user.
| oefrha wrote:
| Pretty sure YouTube has been losing a lot of money every
| year before they very aggressively ramped up ad frequency
| and duration as well as subscriptions in recent years.
| They could only do that thanks to Google's main cash cow;
| YouTube would have been dead if not acquired and
| subsidized by Google.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| studios are the target here, not consumers. Pareto
| principle applies when you need more than a passive user.
| 20% or less of the serious studios (which is already a
| minority) will end up providing 80% of the value of any
| given AI solution.
| Satam wrote:
| So the problem might be two-fold. First, there's an
| oversupply of companies trying to use AI relative to the
| current technological capabilities. Second, even when value
| is created, the companies don't capture the value to profit
| out of it.
| livrem wrote:
| Stability has dreamstudio.ai, but it never seemed like they
| were seriously investing in it to try to compete with
| Midjourney?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yeah, but not sure if OpenAI is profitable yet (they lost
| $500M last year), and costs are rising, and competition
| increasing.
|
| GPT-4 cost $100M+ to train (Altman), but Dario Amodei has
| said next-gen models may cost $1B to train, and $10B models
| are not inconceivable.
|
| I'd guess OpenAI's payroll is probably $0.5B (770 highly paid
| employees + benefits, not to mention hundreds of contractors
| creating data sets).
| samatman wrote:
| It would be negligent for them to aim for profitability
| right now.
|
| They're doing what they should: growing the customer base
| while continuing to work on the next generation of the core
| technology, and developing the support code to apply what
| they have to as broad a cross-section of problems as they
| have the potential to offer a solution for.
| og_kalu wrote:
| Midjourney is the most popular discord channel by far with
| 19.5M+ members, $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external
| investments and only 40 employees.
|
| The problem has nothing to do with commercializing image gen AI
| and all to do with Emad/Stability having seemingly 0 sensible
| business plans.
|
| Seriously this seemed to be the plan:
|
| Step 1: Release SD for free
|
| Step 2: ???
|
| Step 3: Profit
|
| The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the
| steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even think
| the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious hurdle
| to wider commercial adoption.
|
| In my opinion, a paid, easy to use, robust UI around
| Stability's models should have been the number one priority and
| they waited far too long to even begin.
|
| There's been a lot of amazing augmentations to the stable
| diffusion models (ControlNet, Dreambooth etc) that have propped
| up, lots of free research and implementations because the
| research community has latched onto the stability models and I
| feel they failed to capitalize on any of it.
| epivosism wrote:
| Yes, and MJ has no public API either. Same for Ideogram, I
| imagine they have at least 10m in the bank, and aren't even
| bothering making an API despite being SoTA for lots of areas.
| Satam wrote:
| There's money to be made for sure, and Stability's sloppy
| execution and strategy definitely didn't help them. But I
| think there are also industry-wide factors at play that make
| AI companies quite brittle for now.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| I wonder if MidJourney is still ripping. I'm actually curious
| if it's superior to ChatGPT's Dall-E images... I switched and
| cancelled my subscription when ChatGPT added images, but I
| think I was mostly focused on convenience.
| og_kalu wrote:
| If you have a particular style in mind then results may
| vary but aesthetically Midjourney is generally still the
| best, however Dalle-3 has every other model beat in terms
| of prompt adherence.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Image quality, stylistic variety, and resolution are much
| better than ChatGPT. Prompt following is a little better
| with ChatGPT, but MJ v6 has narrowed the gap.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| > $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and
| only 40 employees.
|
| The dream
| manquer wrote:
| For a founder maybe , definitely not for employees .
|
| AI startups need not an insignificant amount of startup
| capital , you cannot just spend weekends to build like you
| would a saas app . Model training is expensive so only
| wealthy individuals can even consider this route
|
| Companies like that have no oversight or control mechanisms
| when management inevitably goes down crazy paths, also
| without external valuations option vesting structures are
| hard to ascertain value.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| As a counter-point, with no VCs there's more equity left
| for employees.
| hsjsbeebue wrote:
| If valued $2bn then even a 0.1% is $2m. Not bad.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Early employees may have gotten 2-3% and are completely
| undiluted.
| hsjsbeebue wrote:
| Yes indeed! Probably furiously vesting now!
| khazhoux wrote:
| As a counter-counter-point that gets rarely discussed on
| HN, VCs aren't taking as much of the pie as people think.
| In a 2-founder, 4-engineer company, it wouldn't be
| unusual to have equity be roughly:
|
| 20% investors 70% founders 2-3% employees (1% emp1, 1%
| emp2, 0.5% emp3, 0.25% emp4) 7% for future employees
| before next funding round
| seanhunter wrote:
| This is not a fair comparison because you are not taking
| into account liquidation preferences. Those investors
| don't have the same class of equity as everyone else.
| That doesn't matter in the case of lights out success but
| it matters a great deal in many other scenarios.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Sure. My point was that most employees think that VCs
| take 80+%, and especially the first few employees usually
| have no idea just how little equity they have compared to
| the founders.
| killerstorm wrote:
| You can't run a sustainable business if you take VC
| money. VCs need an exit.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Sometimes you need to say fuck the money, I've already
| got enough, and I just want to do what I enjoy. It may
| not be an ideal model for HN but damn not everything in
| life is about grinding, P/E ratios, and vesting schedules
| BhavdeepSethi wrote:
| Yeah, that's easier to say when you have enough. A lot of
| employees might not be in that privilege position. The
| reality for some of the folks might be addressing
| education loans, families to take care of, tuition for
| kids, medical bills, etc.
| tasuki wrote:
| Also oversize houses, expensive cars, etc...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Only if your costs are a lot lower than $200M, which given
| the price of GPU compute right now, is not guaranteed.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the
| steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even
| think the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious
| hurdle to wider commercial adoption.
|
| The more I think about the AI space the more I realize that
| open sourcing large models is pointless now.
|
| Until you can reasonably buy a rig to run the model there is
| simply no point in doing this. It's no like you will be
| edified by setting the weights either.
|
| I think an ethical business model for these business is to
| release whatever model can fit into a $10,000 machine and
| keeping the rest closed source until above machine is able to
| run them.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The released image generation models run on consumer GPUs.
| Even the big LLMs will run on a $3500 Mac with reasonable
| performance, and the CPU of a dirt cheap machine if you
| don't care about it being slow, which is sometimes
| important and sometimes isn't.
|
| Also, things like this are in the works:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39794864
|
| Which will put the system RAM of the new 24-channel PC
| servers in range of the Nvidia H100 on memory bandwidth,
| while using commodity DDR5.
| llm_trw wrote:
| The `big' AI models are trillion parameter models.
|
| The medium sized models like GPT3 and Grok are 185b and
| 314b respectively.
|
| There is no way for _anyone_ to run these on a sub $50k
| machine in 2024, and even if you can the token generation
| speed on CPU is under 0.1 tokens per second.
| GaggiX wrote:
| ChatGPT is 20B according to Microsoft researchers, also
| the fact that big AI models are trillion parameter models
| is mostly speculation, about GPT-4 it was spread by
| geohot.
| speedgoose wrote:
| To be precise, ChatGPT 3.5 turbo being 20B is officially
| a mistake from a Microsoft Researcher, quoting a wrong
| source published before the release of chatgpt3.5 turbo.
| Up to you to believe it or not. But I wouldn't claim it's
| a 20B according to Microsoft Researchers.
|
| The withdrawn paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17680
|
| The wrong source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestech
| council/2023/02/17/is...
|
| The discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comme
| nts/17jrj82/new_mic...
| GaggiX wrote:
| It's interesting how the paper was completely retracted
| instead of just being corrected.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| GPT-3 was 175B, so it'd be a bit odd if GPT-4 wasn't at
| least 5x larger (1T), especially since it's apparently a
| mixture of experts.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You can get registered DDR4 for ~$1/GB. A trillion
| parameter model in FP16 would need ~2TB. Servers that
| support that much are actually cheap (~$200), the main
| cost would be the ~$2000 in memory itself. That is going
| to be dog slow but you can certainly do it if you want to
| and it doesn't cost $50,000.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| How slow? Depending on the task I fear it could be too
| slow to be useful.
|
| I believe there is some research on how to distribute
| large models across multiple GPUs, which could make the
| cost less lumpy.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You can get a decent approximation for LLM performance in
| tokens/second by dividing the model size in GB by the
| system's memory bandwidth. That's assuming it's well-
| optimized and memory rather than compute bound, but those
| are often both true or pretty close.
|
| And "depending on the task" is the point. There are
| systems that would be uselessly slow for real-time
| interaction but if your concern is to have it process
| confidential data you don't want to upload to a third
| party you can just let it run and come back whenever it
| finishes. And releasing the model allows people to do the
| latter even if machines necessary to do the former are
| still prohibitively expensive.
|
| Also, hardware gets cheaper over time and it's useful to
| have the model out there so it's well-optimized and
| stable by the time fast hardware becomes affordable
| instead of waiting for the hardware and only then getting
| to work on the code.
| bawana wrote:
| Why would increasing memory bandwidth reduce performance?
| You said "You can get a decent approximation for LLM
| performance in tokens/second by dividing the model size
| in GB by the system's memory bandwidth"
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Even looking on Amazon, DDR4 seems still a decent bit
| above $2/GB:
|
| 2 x 32GB: $142
|
| 2 x 64GB: $318
|
| 8GB: $16
|
| 2 x 16GB: $64
|
| 2TB of 128GB DDR4 ECC: $9,600
| (https://www.amazon.com/NEMIX-RAM-Registered-Compatible-
| Mothe...)
|
| > Servers that support that much are actually cheap
| (~$200)
|
| What does this mean? What motherboards support 2TB of RAM
| at $200? Most of them are pushing $1,000. With no CPU.
|
| It may not hit $50K, but it's definitely not going to be
| $2K.
| raincole wrote:
| It's just semantic gymnastics. I'm sure most people will
| consider LLaMa 70B a big model. Of course if you define
| big = trillion then sure big = trillion[1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
| renewiltord wrote:
| Mixtral 8x7b is better than both of those and runs on a
| top spec M3 Max wonderfully.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| Indeed! Also, Mixtral 8x7b runs just as well on older M1
| Max and M2 Max Macs, since LLM inference is memory
| bandwidth bound and memory bandwidth hasn't significantly
| changed between M1 and M3.
| karolist wrote:
| It didn't change at all, rather was reduced in certain
| configurations.
| Takennickname wrote:
| I will make a 2 trillion parameter model just so your
| comment becomes outdated and wrong.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Disagree. A few weeks ago, I followed a step-by-step
| tutorial to diwnlad ollama, which in turn can download
| various models. On my not-soecisl laptop with a so-so
| graphics card, Mixtral runs just fine.
|
| As models advance, they will become - not just larger - but
| also more efficient. Hardware advances. Large models will
| run just fine on affordable hardware in just a few years.
| Closi wrote:
| I've come to the opposite conclusion personally - AI
| model inference requires burst compute, which
| particularly suits cloud deployment (for these sort of
| applications).
|
| And while AIs may become more compute-efficient in some
| respects, the tasks we ask AIs to do will grow larger and
| more complex.
|
| Sure you might get a good image locally but what about
| when the market moves to video? Sure chat GPT might give
| good responses locally, but how long will it take when
| you want it to refactor an entire codebase?
|
| Not saying that local compute won't have its use-cases
| though... and this is just a prediction that may turn out
| to be spectacularly wrong!
| aerhardt wrote:
| Ok but yesterday I was on a plane coding and I wouldn't
| have minded having GPT4 as it is today available to me.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Thanks to Starlink, planes should have good internet
| soon.
| michaelt wrote:
| Huge models are the _best_ type to open source.
|
| You get all the benefits of academics and open source folks
| pushing your model forward, and a vastly improved hiring
| pool.
|
| But it doesn't stop you launching a commercial offering,
| because 99.99% of the world's population doesn't have 48GB+
| of VRAM.
| biztos wrote:
| Yes, and I'm grateful to them for sticking to that plan. :-)
|
| But for the individuals involved, it might also be
|
| Step 2: Leverage fame in AI space for massive VC injection on
| favorable terms.
| blensor wrote:
| Are we sure that Midjourney is still on that trajectory?
|
| I was a heavy user since the beginning but my usage has
| dropped to almost 0
| jack_riminton wrote:
| I think you're a sample size of one
| blensor wrote:
| I mean of course I am a sample size of one when I am
| speaking about my own experience?
|
| That's why I asked that question to see if others notice
| something similar or if that's just me
| jonplackett wrote:
| Leonardo.ai have basically done exactly this and seem to be
| doing OK.
|
| It's a shame because they're literally just using stable
| diffusion for all their tech but built a nicer front end and
| incorporated control net. No-where else has done this.
|
| Controlnet / instantID etc are the really killer things about
| SD and make it way more powerful than Midjourney, but they
| aren't even available via the stability API. They just don't
| seem to care.
| mikehearn wrote:
| InstantID uses a non-commercial licensed model (from
| insightface) as part of its pipeline so I think that makes
| it a no-go for being part of Stability's commercial
| service.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| Heres a Stable Diffusion buisness idea: sign up all the
| celebrities and artists who are cool with AI, and provide end
| users / fans with an AI image generation interface, trained
| on their exclusive likenesses / artwork (loras).
|
| You know, the old tried and true licensed merchandise model.
| Everybody gets paid.
| ben_w wrote:
| Why would those celebs pay Stability any significant money
| for this, given they can get it for a one off payment of at
| most a few hundred dollars salary/opportunity cost by
| paying an intern to gather the images and feed it into the
| existing free tools for training a LoRA?
| brandall10 wrote:
| I think in this case the celebs are getting paid for
| using their likeness.
| ben_w wrote:
| That sounds like the "lose money on every sale"
| philosophy of the first dot-com bubble, only without even
| the "but make it up in volume" second half.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| You can already do that with reference images and even for
| inpainting. No training required. Also no need to pay
| actors outrageous sums to use their likeness in perpetuity
| as long as you do business. The licensing still tricky
| anyways, because even if the face is approved and
| certified, the entire body and surroundings would also have
| to be. Otherwise you basically re-invented the celebrity
| deepfake porn movement. I don't see any A-lister signing up
| for that.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think the following isn't said often enough: there must
| be a reason why there are extremely few celebrities and
| artists who are cool with AI, and it cannot be something
| abstract and bureaucratic as copyright concerns although
| those are problematic.
|
| It's just not there yet. GenAI outputs aren't something
| audiences wants to hang on a wall. It's something that
| evoke sense of distress. Otherwise everyone's tracing them
| at least.
| ben_w wrote:
| Most people mix up all the different kinds of
| intellectual property basically all the time[0], so while
| people _say_ it 's about copyright, I (currently) think
| it's more likely to be a mixture of "moral rights" (the
| right to be named as the creator of a work) and
| trademarks (registered or otherwise), and in the case of
| celebrities, "personality rights":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
|
| > It's just not there yet. GenAI outputs aren't something
| audiences wants to hang on a wall.
|
| People have a wide range of standards. Last summer I
| attended the We Are Developers event in Berlin, and there
| were huge posters that I could easily tell were from AI
| due to the eyes not matching; more recently, I've used (a
| better version) to convert a photo of a friend's dog into
| a renaissance oil painting, and it was beyond my skill to
| find the flaws with it... yet my friend noticed
| instantly.
|
| Also, even with "real art", Der Kuss (by Klimt) is widely
| regarded as being good art, beautiful, romantic, etc. --
| yet to me, the man looks like he has a broken neck, while
| the woman looks like she's been decapitated at the
| shoulder then had her head rotated 90deg and reattached
| via her ear.
|
| [0] This is also why people look at a Google street view
| image with a (c)2017 Google[1] tiled over on a blue sky
| and say "LOL, Google's trying to own the sky", or why
| people even on this very forum ask how some new company
| can trademark a descriptive term like "GPT"[2], seemingly
| surprised by this being possible even though there's
| already a very convenient example of e.g. Hasbro already
| having "Transformers".
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7319434,10.8655264,3a
| ,77.2y,...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35692476
| numpad0 wrote:
| > Der Kuss (by Klimt) is widely regarded as being good
| art,
|
| The point is, generative AI images are not widely
| regarded as good art. They're often seen as passable for
| some filler use cases and hard to tell apart from human
| generations, but not "good".
|
| It's not not-there-yet because AI sometimes generates
| sixth fingers, it's something another level from Gustav
| Klimt, Damien Hirst, Kusama Yayoi, or the likes[0]. It
| could be that genAI is leaving something that human
| artist would filter out, or because images are too
| disorganized that they appear to us to be encoding malice
| or other negative emotions, or maybe I'm just wrong and
| it's all about anatomy.
|
| But whatever the reason is, IMO, it's way too rarely
| considered good, gaining too few supportive celebrities
| and artists and audiences, to work.
|
| 0: I admit I'm not well versed with contemporary art, or
| art in general for that matter
| ben_w wrote:
| > The point is, generative AI images are not widely
| regarded as good art. They're often seen as passable for
| some filler use cases and hard to tell apart from human
| generations, but not "good".
|
| > It's not not-there-yet because AI sometimes generates
| sixth fingers, it's something another level from Gustav
| Klimt
|
| My point is: yes AI is different -- it's _better_. (Or,
| less provocatively: better _by my specific standards_ ).
|
| Always? No. But I chose Der Kuss _specifically because of
| the high regard in which it is held_ , and yet to my eye
| it messes with anatomy as badly as if he had put 6
| fingers on one of the hands (indeed, my first impression
| when I look closely at the hand of the man behind the
| head of the woman, is that the fingers art too long and
| thumb looks like a finger).
| vasco wrote:
| > sign up all the celebrities and artists who are cool with
| AI
|
| "Cool with AI" and "sell my likeness so nobody ever needs
| to hire me again" are too close for comfort on this one.
| Loughla wrote:
| And also, here's a way to just make so much pornography
| of me.
|
| I'm betting the list of folks who would sign the AI
| license are pretty small, and mostly irrelevant.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Seriously this seemed to be the plan:
|
| > Step 1: Release SD for free
|
| > Step 2: ???
|
| > Step 3: Profit
|
| That's not true. He was pretty open about the business plan.
| The plan was to have open foundational models and provide
| services to governments and corporations that wanted custom
| models trained on private data, tailored to their specific
| jurisdictions and problem domains.
| ptero wrote:
| Was there _any_ traction on this? I cannot imagine
| government services being early customers. What models
| would the want?Military -- maybe, for simulation or
| training, but that requires focus, dedicated effort and a
| lot of time. My 2c.
| lumost wrote:
| I've heard this pitch from a few AI labs. I suspect that
| they will fail, customers just want a model that works in
| the shortest amount of time and effort. The vast majority
| of companies do not have useful fine tuning data or
| skills. Consultancy businesses are low margin and hard to
| scale.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| First paragraph: These are wild stats. Thank you to share.
| How did they fund themselves, if no external funding?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| What's insane to me is the fact that the best interfaces to
| utilize any of these models, from open source LLMs to open
| source diffusion models, are still random gradio webUIs made
| by the 4chan/discord anime profile picture crowd.
|
| Automatic1111, ComfyUI, Oobabooga. There's more value within
| these 3 projects than within at least 1 billion dollars worth
| of money thrown around on yet another podunk VC backed firm
| with no product.
|
| It appears that no one is even trying to seriously compete
| with them on the two primary things that they excel at - 1.
| Developer/prosumer focus and 2. extension ecosystem.
|
| Also, if you're a VC/Angel reading my comments about this, I
| would very much love to talk to you.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >It won't be decades, but a few more years would be helpful
|
| I see it this way to be honest:
|
| - companies will aggresively try to use AI in the next 2-3
| years, downsizing themselves in the meantime
|
| - the 3-5 year launch mark will show that downsizing was an
| awful idea and took too many hits to really be worth it. I
| don't know if those hits will be in profits (depends on the
| company) but it will clearly hit that uncanny valley.
|
| - 6-8 year mark will have studios hiring like crazy to get the
| talent they bled back. They won't be as big as before, but it
| will grow to a more sane level of operation.
|
| - 10-12 year mark will have the "Apple" of AI finally nail the
| happy medium between efficiency and profitability (hopefully
| without devastating the workers, but who knows?). Competitors
| will follow throw and properly usher the promises AI is making
| right now.
|
| - 15 year mark is when AI has proper pipelining, training,
| college courses, legal lines, etc. established and becomes
| standard faire, no stranger than using an IDE.
|
| As I see it, companies and AI tech alike are trying to pretend
| to be the 10 year mark all the while we're currently in legal
| talks and figuring out what and where to use AI to begin with.
| In my biased opinion, I hope there's enough red tape on
| generative art to make it not worth it for large studios to
| leverage it easily (e.g. generative art loses all
| copyright/trademarkability, even if using owned IPs. Likely not
| that extreme, but close).
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Companies are aware of the current AI generation being a tool
| and not a full replacement (or they will be after the first
| experiments they perform).
|
| They will not downsize, they will train their workforce or
| hire replacements that are willing to pick up these more
| powerful and efficient tools. In the hands of a skilled
| professional there will be no uncanny valley.
|
| This will result in surplus funds, that can be invested in
| more talent, which in turn will keep feeding AI development.
| The only way is up.
|
| Not allowing copyright on AI generated work is a ridiculous
| and untenable decision that will be overturned eventually.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You greatly overestimate how quickly companies learned.
| Outsourcing has been a thing for decades and to this day
| some people are still trying to do it to cut costs. I guess
| that's what happens when you don't value retention nor
| document previous decisions. You repeat the cycle.
|
| Sure, the smart companies will use it as a tool, but most
| companies aren't smart, or just don't care. It'll vary by
| industry. There is already talks of sizing down
| VFX/Animation for a mix of outsourcing and AI reliance, for
| example. And industry that already underpays its artists.
|
| >Not allowing copyright on AI generated work is a
| ridiculous and untenable decision that will be overturned
| eventually.
|
| Maybe, once the dust settles on who and what and how you
| copyright AI. It'll be a while, though. But I get the
| logic. No one can (nor wants to) succinctly explain what
| sources were used in a generative art work right now, and
| that generative process drives the art a lot more than the
| artist for most generative art. Even without AI there is a
| line between "I lightly edited this existing work on
| photosshop" and "I significantly altered a base template to
| the point where you can't recognize the template anymore"
| where copyright will kick in.
|
| Still, my biased hopes involve them being very strict with
| this line. You can't just give 2 prompts and expect to
| "own" an artwork.
| dagelf wrote:
| Models are already general, and you can set them to
| recursively self improve narrowly and still need humans in
| the loop for general improvement... but those humans are only
| going to get less... so change your years into months instead
| and multiply by rand(2)... and change the hire-backs into
| more startups doing more things...?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 90% of startups fail, so it's not just a matter of waiting for
| the tech to get better and having more value - most of the
| current players will simply fail and go out of business.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Previous controversy involving the CEO (2023):
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-di...
|
| " In reality, Mostaque has a bachelor's degree, not a master's
| degree from Oxford. The hedge fund's banner year was followed by
| one so poor that it shut down months later. The U.N. hasn't
| worked with him for years. And while Stable Diffusion was the
| main reason for his own startup Stability AI's ascent to
| prominence, its source code was written by a different group of
| researchers. "Stability, as far as I know, did not even know
| about this thing when we created it," Bjorn Ommer, the professor
| who led the research, told Forbes. "They jumped on this wagon
| only later on." "
|
| " "What he is good at is taking other people's work and putting
| his name on it, or doing stuff that you can't check if it's
| true."
| coolspot wrote:
| He did provide thousands of GPUs for training all those open-
| source and open-weights models, no?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| People forget, moving things around and funding them and
| making it all work is what makes an entrepreneur. Elon Musk
| did that and all great founders do that. Emad doesn't have to
| write the code himself.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| Maybe... he certainly was good at taking credit for it. Not
| course if they stepped in, rebranded something they didn't
| make and threw a bunch of AwS GPUs they couldn't actually
| afford at it though
|
| https://petapixel.com/2023/06/05/so-many-things-dont-add-
| up-...
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| So where can I download that thing he took credit for?
| ShamelessC wrote:
| https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion
| anonylizard wrote:
| Emad had the genius idea of essentially paying for the branding
| rights to an AI model. This was viewed as insane in the pre-
| ChatGPT era, and only paid off massively in retrospect.
|
| Also all those 'controversies' were mostly the result of an
| aggrieved co-founder/investor who decided to sell their shares
| before SD1.4's success. Emad may not have proven to be
| competent enough to run an large AI lab in the long run, but
| those complaints are just trivial 'controversies'.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > This was viewed as insane in the pre-ChatGPT era, and only
| paid off massively in retrospect.
|
| Paid off how?
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| Perhaps the hundreds of millions in VC investment and
| company value?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that if a
| company gets a valuation because of an investment, that
| creates value?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| They are saying it was not clear "buying branding rights
| to an image model" would lead to any investments, any
| kind of high valuation, or any other financial success.
| It is only clear in hindsight.
| l33tman wrote:
| How would you otherwise define value, except the value
| that someone is willing to assign to a share of a company
| or goods when purchasing?
|
| Value can go up and down though..
| seydor wrote:
| Lots of people have used SD commercially, so we've been
| paid off collectively
| spxneo wrote:
| wow I did NOT know this
|
| I wonder how many ppl among VC/PE circles are also sugar
| coating their experiences and successes
| dpflan wrote:
| It's the game to play. Asymmetric information with the goal
| to attain wealth, influence, power, ego-stroke, whatever
| opportunity is present.
| imadj wrote:
| > What he is good at is taking other people's work and putting
| his name on it, or doing stuff that you can't check if it's
| true.
|
| I have to say, this is a quite common ignorant statement that's
| said about almost every CEO.
|
| I'm not sure if there's more to it in this particular case, but
| no, CEOs aren't stealing your work. Similarly, marketers aren't
| parasites. Designers aren't there to waste your time. Many
| engineers seem to hold similar belief that others are holding
| them down or taking advantage of their work. This is just a
| congnitive bias.
| subtra3t wrote:
| Not surprised at all to see how unpopular this sentiment is
| on HN. For some reason HN seems to love one dimensional
| stereotypes for every job that isn't theirs.
|
| Actually that's wrong, even the idea that engineers are
| smarter than managers is very prevalent here.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Emad jumped on the train after the major inventions were
| invented and PoCs were made. He could not have contributed to
| them unless he had a time machine. (Yes he contributed to the
| training costs of SD1.4 but the time point when he made the
| decision was not early research.)
| imadj wrote:
| Sorry I'm not well versed in the story and it's still not
| clear to me what he did wrong.
|
| Where is the controversy here? Is the CEO expected to
| contribute to research? there seems to be some context I'm
| missing
| barrkel wrote:
| FWIW, Rombach and Esser, the two guys behind the original
| model, gave some appreciation for Emad on Twitter just now.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| An Oxford MA is confusingly what you automatically a few years
| after leaving undergrad
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Arts_(Oxford,_Cambri...
|
| So there's that
| seydor wrote:
| Thats a hit piece, but whatever, isn't that what the most
| prominent/funded academics do? As far as i know he is known
| generally as CEO of the company that makes SD, not as the
| creator of SD. It does look like without him these models
| wouldnt have evolved so much
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| Really sad to see. Emad pivoting to posting crypto nonsense on
| twitter made me think the writing is on the wall for Stability,
| but I still didn't expect it so soon. I expect they'll pivot to
| closed models and then fade away.
| rvz wrote:
| > Really sad to see. Emad pivoting to posting crypto nonsense
| on twitter made me think the writing is on the wall for
| Stability
|
| Open-source AI is a race to zero that makes little money and
| Stability was facing lawsuits (especially with Getty) which are
| mounting into the millions and the company was already burning
| tens of millions.
|
| Despite being the actual "Open AI", Stability cannot afford to
| sustain itself doing so.
| yreg wrote:
| Source on them burning tens of millions? What are they
| burning it on?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I expect they'll pivot to closed models and then fade away.
|
| They already pivoted away from open-licensed models.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| > crypto nonsense on twitter
|
| got any links?
| tymscar wrote:
| Not twitter but here he is talking about that:
|
| https://youtu.be/BdZo4JUBSQk
| spxneo wrote:
| You know it never ceases to amaze me how even the most
| respected fall prey to this money laundering scheme. If
| people even spent some time to read about Tether they would
| not touch this stuff. It's blood money.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I suspect a lot of them know it's a scam, they just want
| in on it and don't want to admit it.
| drsnow wrote:
| Exactly how is cryptocurrency merely a "money laundering
| scheme"?
| tasuki wrote:
| I've never owned any Tether, so don't know much about it.
| How is it blood money?
| hruzgar wrote:
| Do you even know the tech behind crypto? Just because
| scammers and similar people use and promote it, doesn't
| make it a bad technology at all.
| shwaj wrote:
| Tether isn't crypto though, in the sense of being
| decentralized, permissionless, etc
| Tangokat wrote:
| With a bold claim like that citations would be in order.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Wow much of what he's saying in that video is a lie with
| regards to the history of latent diffusion, creating an
| open source GPT3, etc. Just taking credit for a bunch of
| work he didn't have much to do with.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| Translation of "stepping down to focus on distributed AI":
|
| Getting fired and making moves to capitalize on the current
| crypto boom while it lasts
| n2d4 wrote:
| Getting fired by whom? He is both the majority shareholder
| and controls the board
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't know much about him. Was he into cryptocurrency before
| AI?
| benreesman wrote:
| I mean, is AI a less sketchy space in 2024 than
| crypto/blockchain in 2024? Two or three years ago sure, I
| guess, but today?
|
| The drama around OpenAI is well documented, there are multiple
| lawsuits and an SEC investigation at least in embryo, Karpathy
| bounced and Ilya's harder to spot than Kate Middleton (edit:
| please see below edit in regards to this tasteless quip).
| NVIDIA is pushing the Dutch East India Company by some measures
| of profitability with AMD's full cooperation: George Hotz
| doesn't knuckle under to the man easily and he's thrown in the
| towel on ever getting usable drivers on "gaming"-class gear. At
| least now I guess the Su-Huang Thanksgiving dinners will be
| less awkward.
|
| Of the now over a dozen FAANG/AI "boomerangs" I know, all of
| them predate COVID hiring or whatever and all get crammed down
| on RSU grants they accumulated over years: whether or not phone
| calls got made it's pretty clearly on everyone's agenda to wash
| all the ESOP out, neutron bomb the Peninsula, and then hire
| everyone back with at dramatically lower TC all while blowing
| EPS out quarter after quarter.
|
| Meanwhile the FOMC is openly talking about looser labor markets
| via open market operations (that's _direct government
| interference in free labor markets to suppress wages_ for the
| pro-capitalism folks, think a little about what capitalism is
| supposed to mean if you are ok with this), and this against the
| backdrop of an election between two men having trouble
| campaigning effectively because one is fighting off dozens of
| lawsuits including multiple felony charges and the other is
| flying back and forth between Kiev and Tel Aviv trying to
| manage two wars he can 't seem to manage: IIRC Biden is in
| Ukraine right now trying to keep Zelenskyy from drone-bombing
| any more refineries of Urals crude because `CL` or whatever is
| up like 5% in the last three weeks which is really bad in an
| election year looking to get nothing but uglier: is anyone
| really arguing that some meme on /r/crypto is what's pushing
| e.g. BTC and not a pretty shaky-looking Fed?
|
| Meanwhile over in crypto land, over the same period of time
| that AI and other marquee Valley tech has been turning into a
| scandal-plagued orgy of ugly headlines on a nearly daily basis,
| the regulators have actually been getting serious about sending
| bad actors to jail or leaning on them with the prospect (SBF,
| CZ), major ETFs and futures serviced by reputable exchanges
| (e.g. CME) have entered mainstream portfolios, and a new
| generation of exchanges (`dy/dx`, Vertex, Apex, Orderly) backed
| by conventional finance investments in robust bridge
| infrastructure (LayerZero) are now doing standard Island/ARCA-
| style efficient matching and then using the blockchain for what
| it's for: printing a consolidated, Reg NMS/NBBO/SIP-style
| consolidated tape.
|
| As a freelancer I don't really have a dog in this fight, I
| judge projects by feasibility, compensation, and minimum ick
| factor. From the vantage point of my flow the AI projects are
| sketchier looking on average and below market bids on average
| contrasted to the blockchain projects, a stark reversal from
| even six months ago.
|
| Edit: I just saw the news about Kate Middleton, I was unaware
| of this when I wrote the above which is in extremely poor taste
| in light of that news. My thoughts and prayers are with her and
| her family.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I and many many people around me use ChatGPT every single day
| in our lives. AI has a lot of hype but it's backed by real
| crap that's useful. Crypto on the other hand never really did
| anything practical except help people buy drugs and launder
| money. Or make people money in the name of investments.
| sevagh wrote:
| CL: Lee Chae-rin (Korean rapper), Craigslist, Chlorine
|
| NMS: Neuroleptic malignant syndrome, No Man's Sky
|
| NBBO: National Best Bid and Offer
|
| SIP: Session Initiation Protocol, Systematic Investment Plan,
| Security Infrastructure Program
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| The writing was on the wall for Stability AI after they went on
| the massive anti-adult content tirade for their newer models.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I don't know if that is a factor. But the dog whistle is
| "safety".
| anonylizard wrote:
| That 'anti-adult tirade' is a strategic choice.
|
| 1. Open source even more capable 'adult models' and get sued to
| oblivion (They still have massive lawsuits)
|
| 2. Neuter the model to uselessness and have users abandon it.
|
| Both are bad choices, and require a very, very skilled CEO to
| thread the needle. Emad failed. that's all.
| astrange wrote:
| No, that's the sign they're being sensible, since the thing you
| want is illegal in most countries.
| immibis wrote:
| I looked this up and apparently the controversy is that
| Stable Diffusion was trained on child porn? How can the model
| itself not be considered objectionable material then? Does
| the law not apply some kind of transitive rule to this? And
| don't they want to arrest someone for having the child porn
| to train it on?
| astrange wrote:
| There's two controversies that are the opposite of each
| other.
|
| 1. Some people are mad that Stable Diffusion might be
| trained on CSAM because the original list of internet
| images they started with turned out to link to some. (LAION
| doesn't actually contain images, just links to them.)
|
| This one isn't true, because they removed NSFW content
| before training.
|
| 2. Some other people are mad that they removed NSFW content
| because they think it's censorship.
|
| That actually isn't the legal issue I meant though. It's
| not that they trained on it, it's that it contains adult
| material at all (and can be shown to children easily), and
| that it can be used to generate simulated CSAM, which some
| but not all countries are just as unhappy about.
| mindcandy wrote:
| To say it was "trained on child porn" is just about the
| most "well, technically...." thing that can be said about
| anything.
|
| Several huge commercial and academic projects scraped
| billions of images off of the Internet and filtered them
| best they knew how. SD trained on some set of those and
| later some researchers managed to identify a small number
| of images classified as CP were still in there.
|
| So, out of the billions of images, was there greater than
| zero CP images? Yes. Was it intentional/negligent? No. Does
| it affect the output in any significant way? No. Does it
| make for internet rage bait and pitchforking? Definitely.
| yreg wrote:
| I love their product, but I was suspect of Emad ever since he
| said "There will be no programmers in five years."[0]
|
| That just sounds so simplistic that I don't believe he believes
| it himself.
|
| [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stability-ai-ceo-no-
| human-193...
| ramraj07 wrote:
| The worst thing here is not that he doesn't believe in it
| himself, but that he does. As George Costanza said, "it's not a
| lie if you believe it"
| yreg wrote:
| No, my problem is that I don't believe he believes it. It is
| a lie.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| The CEO of nvidia said basically the same thing so I don't know
| if that's the best metric.
| lolinder wrote:
| You mean the CEO of the company that just rode the AI hype
| wave to become one of the top 3 most valuable companies in
| the world? It's his fiduciary duty to say things like that,
| whether or not he believes them, the same as every other CEO
| in the AI space.
| bbarnett wrote:
| There is no fiduciary duty to lie, or make up stories you
| do not believe.
|
| People really oversell fiduciary duty. Yet the whole point
| of top-level corporate roles is to steer a company
| predicated upon opinion, which means that you have great
| latitude to act without malfeasance.
| dheera wrote:
| Unfortunately when Stability shuts down Wall Street might get
| spooked that the bubble is popping and downvote NVDA
| bruce511 wrote:
| I think when parsing that statement it's important to
| understand his (and your) definition of "programmer".
|
| We (I) tend to use the term "programmer" in a generic way,
| encompassing a bunch of tasks waaay beyond "just typing in new
| code". Whereas I suspect he used it in the narrowest possible
| definition (literally, code-typer).
|
| My day job (which I call programming) consists of needs
| analysis, data-modelling, workflow and UI design, coding,
| documenting, presenting, iterating, debugging, extending, and
| cycling through this loop multiple times. All while
| collaborating with customers, managers, co-workers, check-
| writers and so on.
|
| AI can do -some- of that. And it can do small bits of it really
| well. It will improve in some of the other bits.
|
| Plus, a new job description will appear- "prompt engineer".
|
| As an aside I prefer the term "software developer " for what I
| do, I think it's a better description than "programmer".
|
| Maybe one day there'll be an AI that can do software
| development. Developers that don't need to eat, sleep, or take
| a piss. But not today.
|
| (P.S. to companies looking to make money with AI - make them
| able to replace me in Zoom meetings. I'd pay for that...)
| hsjsbeebue wrote:
| There are almost no programmers today (you need to do malloc
| and low level sys calls in C to be considered a programmer).
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| I don't think you can be considered a programmer if you
| can't write your own syscall firmware code in assembly.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I don't think you can be considered a programmer if you
| can't perfurate your own punch cards.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/378/
| immibis wrote:
| That's right. We invented programming AI a very long time
| ago, and called it an "assembler". All you had to do was
| tell the assembler what kind of program you wanted, and it
| would do the programming work for you!
|
| Then we invented another AI to tell the assembler what kind
| of program you wanted, and called it a "compiler". All you
| had to do was tell the compiler what kind of program you
| wanted it to tell the assembler you wanted, and it would do
| all the not-exactly-programming work for you!
|
| And so on...
| immibis wrote:
| P.S. Visual Basic with its GUI designer was a quite
| effective way to rapidly build apps of questionable
| quality but great business value. Somebody should bring
| that paradigm back.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Well it's been almost a year since he said that. You would
| think we'd have lost the first chunk of programmers to AI by
| now.
| callalex wrote:
| We have, there are a bunch of bottom of the barrel executives
| that have done hiring freezes and layoffs under the
| assumption that AI would replace everything. It will go the
| exact same way as the outsourcing craze that swept the
| industry in the mid aughts. The executives that initiate the
| savings will be praised and rewarded lavishly, and then when
| everything blows up and falls apart those responsible for the
| short sighted and ineffective cuts will be long gone.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Are there any good numbers on how many positions this has
| affected?
| jart wrote:
| https://layoffs.fyi/
| andrepd wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Elon Musk also didn't believe in "FSD in 6
| months" every time he said it, but it was just marketing.
| Filligree wrote:
| I guess SD3 will never be released, then. What a pity. :-/
| astrange wrote:
| That's silly. For one thing, he says he's still the majority
| shareholder.
| barrkel wrote:
| That's my guess too. Emad teased SD3 while it looked like he
| was looking for more money, but without convincing rationale
| for not releasing it already. The samples may have been heavily
| cherry-picked, we don't know if it's actually a decent model in
| practice.
| riwsky wrote:
| OpenAI? closed source. Stability AI? facing instability.
|
| Startup idea: Unprofitable.ai
| sidcool wrote:
| Accenture : $1.1 billion GenAI projects!
| technics256 wrote:
| Looks like he went to crypto
|
| https://x.com/sreeramkannan/status/1771340250801127664?s=46
| ilaksh wrote:
| Decentralized systems, peer to peer, Blockchain, smart
| contracts, are all important technologies with real use cases.
| It is not accurate to refer to any of them as simply "crypto"
| especially in this context.
| dpflan wrote:
| EigenLayer's tag line is? "Build open innovation [?] play
| infinite sum games. Also: @eigen_da" (from their twitter
| profile).
|
| Infinite sum games...
| stedman wrote:
| LMAO
|
| "infinite games" + "positive sum" => "infinite sum"
|
| has big Sarah Palin energy: "refute" + "repudiate" =>
| "refudiate"
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2010/11/15/13133.
| ..
| bicepjai wrote:
| Wow, the comments seems mean spirited. I would say Thanks for
| releasing open source models and accepting to pass the torch
| raincole wrote:
| I'm very grateful for SD. But I'm also quite sure SD3 and the
| future models won't be open.
| PerryCox wrote:
| I interviewed at Stability AI a while ago and that interview was
| a complete shit show. They quite literally spent 40 minutes
| talking about Emad and his "vision". I think we actually talked
| about what they wanted me to do there for like 15 minutes.
|
| I was not feeling confident about them as a company that I wanted
| to work for before that interview, afterwards I knew that was a
| company I wouldn't work for.
| tonyoconnell wrote:
| His shares still have majority vote and full board control.
| ml-anon wrote:
| Emad is such an obvious grifter it's honestly mad that he
| attracted so much VC money.
|
| He couldn't even get his own story straight regarding his
| education and qualifications which should be a pretty clear
| disqualifying red flag from the outset.
|
| The Forbes article from last year was dismissed on here as a hit
| piece but the steady flow of talent out was the clear sign,
| capped by the original SD authors leaving last week (probably
| after some vesting event or external funding coming through).
| Simon321 wrote:
| Exactly, i don't understand why people are not seeing this
| hruzgar wrote:
| haters always gonna hate no matter what someone does
| feverzsj wrote:
| "AI"s are still pretty much vaporwares like 40 years ago. When
| people get tired of these toys, the bubble will simply burst, and
| nothing valuable left.
| oyster143 wrote:
| I use chat-gpt almost every day and find it very usefull
| renonce wrote:
| Competitors are catching up and one day the chat API
| providers will race the prices to bottom
| stein1946 wrote:
| Doesn't this apply to any product though?
| janalsncm wrote:
| That's not the same thing as chat gpt being vaporware.
| samatman wrote:
| Eliminates that possibility in fact. You can't "catch up"
| to vaporware because there's nothing to catch up to.
| huytersd wrote:
| Catching up to what they released a year ago. We don't know
| what's coming up next.
| feverzsj wrote:
| And how you gonna verify chat-gpt's result? By googling?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Also, research isn't the only benefit, code generation,
| roleplay bots, are pretty good too.
| vunderba wrote:
| Here's an example of some thing I tried at random a few
| weeks ago. I have a bunch of old hand written notes that
| are mind maps and graphs written on notebooks from 10+
| years ago. I snapped a picture of all of the different
| graphs with my phone, threw them into chatGPT and asked it
| to convert them to mermaid UML syntax.
|
| Every single one of them converted flawlessly when I
| brought them into my markdown note tool.
|
| If you're using chatGPT as nothing more than a glorified
| fact checker and not taking advantage of the multimodal
| capabilities such as vision, OCR, Python VM, generative
| imagery, you're really _missing the point._
| threatripper wrote:
| Exactly how you would verify the result that your human
| underling yielded. You can even delegate the googling and
| summation to the AI and just verify the verification.
| huytersd wrote:
| It has provided sources and does internet lookups for a
| while now
| samatman wrote:
| Good question actually.
|
| There are a few options. I work with a REPL, so I usually
| load the answer from a scratch file and put some
| representative data into it. When the result is wrong,
| which often happens, I feed ChatGPT the error, and it
| corrects the code accordingly. Iterating this results in a
| working function about 80% of the time. Sometimes it loses
| the plot and I either give up or start over with more
| detailed instructions.
|
| You can also ask it to write tests, some of which will
| pass, some of which will fail. It's pretty easy to eyeball
| whether or not a test is valid, and they won't always be
| valid, I just fix those by hand.
| mikelitoris wrote:
| So... instability.ai?
| gdsdfe wrote:
| AI as a field feels like crypto from a few years back
| patchinko wrote:
| At least, this has the same impact on GPU prices.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| He probably saw all the crypto AI grifters make hundreds of
| millions and wanted in on the action.
|
| With his name attached, any crypto AI coin will launch straight
| to $500m mcap
| frays wrote:
| I can't find much information about Shan Shan Wong, the new co-
| CEO. Not even a photo of this person on the internet.
|
| Anyone else have information about them?
| Razengan wrote:
| What's with these weirdly convoluted re-spellings of
| Arabic/Muslim names to make them look not Arabic/Muslim?
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| He's not an Arab, he's ethnically Bangladeshi, and that's a
| common way to spell his name here.
| malthaus wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emad_Mostaque
|
| that wikipedia page screams "grifter", wow
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Really no wonder he ended up in "decentralized AI" aka crypto
| grifting. It must be like returning home after a long day.
| jacky2wong wrote:
| I think Stability is in an interesting situation. A few
| suggestions on its direction and current state: 1. Stability AI's
| loss of talent at the foundational research layer is worrying.
| They've lost an incredibly expensive moat and there's enough
| unsolved problems in the foundation layer (faster models, more
| energy efficient models, etc.) to ensure Stability provides
| differentiated offerings. Step 1 should be rectifying the core
| issues of employment and refocusing this more into the AI lab
| space. I have no doubt this will require a re-steering of the
| ship and re-focusing of the "mission". 2. Stability AI's
| "mission" of building models for every modality everywhere has
| caused the company to lose focus. Resources are spread thin. With
| $100M in funding, there should be a pointed focus in certain
| areas - such as imaging or video. Midjourney has shown there is
| sufficient value capture already in just 1 modality. E.g.
| StableLM seems like early revenue rush and a bad bet with poor
| differentiation. 3. There is sufficient competition on the API
| layer. Stability's commitment to being open-source will continue
| to entice researchers and developers but there should be a re-
| focus on improvements in the applied layer. Deep UX wrappers for
| image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack
| for image generation or video generation would be a great focal
| point for Stability that separates itself from the competition.
| People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves
| their problems.
| achow wrote:
| > _Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while
| owning the end to end stack for image generation or video
| generation would be a great focal point for Stability that
| separates itself from the competition. People don 't pay for
| images, they pay for images that solves their problems._
|
| Recently, during an interview [1], when questioned about
| OpenAI's Sora, Shantanu Narayen (Adobe CEO) gave an interesting
| perspective on where value is created. His view (paraphrased
| generously)..
|
| GenAI entails 3 'layers': Data, Foundational Models and the
| Interface Layer.
|
| Why Sora may not be a big threat is because Adobe operates not
| only at first two layers (Data and Foundational model) but also
| at the interface layer. Not only Adobe perhaps knows better
| than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker, but
| I guess most importantly they already have moviemakers as their
| customers.
|
| So product companies like Adobe (& Microsoft, Google etc.) are
| in better position to monetize GenAI. Pure-play AI companies
| like OpenAI are perhaps in B2B business. Actually, they maybe
| really in api business, they would have great data, would be
| building great foundational models and giving results of those
| as APIs; which other companies who are closer to their unique
| set of customers with their unique needs would be able to
| monetize and some part of those $$ flows back to pure-play AI
| companies
|
| [1] At 5 mins mark..
| https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/02/20/adobe-ceo-shantanu-nar...
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what
| is need and workflow of a moviemaker
|
| I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and their
| UI/UX and how they don't understand their customers.
|
| Never really used any of their products myself though. Maybe
| they still are best-in-class. I can't tell.
| bamboozled wrote:
| People love illustrator
| andy_ppp wrote:
| People also hate illustrator
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| It was good in the 00s but now it's rickety and
| antiquated and the GPU acceleration was never implemented
| correctly.
|
| Figma could build an illustrator killer in 6 months if
| they wanted to and it would be obliterated.
|
| If they actually tackled this task people would be
| kicking themselves for putting up with the shambles that
| is illustrator for this long.
| ska wrote:
| > Figma could build an illustrator killer in 6 months if
| they wanted to and it would be obliterated
|
| Statements like this are almost always wrong, if for no
| other reason that a technically superior alternative is
| rarely compelling enough by itself. It that weren't the
| case you would see it happen far more often...
| nerdbert wrote:
| Only because Adobe forced them to by murdering Freehand
| in front of their eyes.
| achow wrote:
| Sure there maybe scope of improvement in the products, but
| the point is they have $Billions in sale (year on year) to
| those customers (Ad agencies, movie studios etc.).
| andy99 wrote:
| I don't know Adobe's business so could be wrong, but maybe
| "creatives" are not their key customers? If they're
| focusing on enterprise sales, they're selling to enterprise
| decision makers.
|
| Every user hates using microsoft products, and don't get me
| started on SAP. But these are gigantic companies with
| wildly successful products aimed at enterprise customers.
| kamikaz1k wrote:
| If they're selling to enterprise decision makers, aren't
| they also B2B? In which case they have the same
| deficiency they started OpenAI has.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > Every user hates using microsoft products
|
| Only because they've never had a chance to experience the
| competition.
|
| Having worked in IBM and had to use the Lotus Office
| Suite I can tell you Microsoft won fair and square. And
| I'm not even talking about the detestable abomination
| that is Lotus Notes.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Many years ago it was a good offering but it's becoming
| increasingly clear with outsourcing and talent drain that
| the current teams working on the likes of Photoshop, After
| Effects and Premier do not actually understand how the core
| tool, both in its inner workings or even how it draws its
| own UI works at all and couldn't either recreate it or even
| change its existing behavior.
|
| Every major change in the last 6 years has either been
| weird window dressing changes to welcome panels or new
| document panels, in all cases building sluggish jank heavy
| interfaces, try navigating to a folder in the premier one
| and weep as clicks take actual seconds to recognize.
|
| Or just silly floating tooltips like the ones in Photoshop
| that also take a second to visible draw in.
|
| All tangible tool changes exist outside the interface or
| you jump to a web interface in a window and back with the
| results being passed between in a way that makes it very
| obvious the developers are trying to avoid touching the
| core tools code.
|
| Very clear Narayens outsourcing and not being a product guy
| has lead to this
| orbital-decay wrote:
| It's been like this since at least late 90s. At this
| point Photoshop is similar to Windows in that it has at
| least 6 mismatching UIs from 6 different eras in it. (or
| maybe more)
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and
| their UI/UX and how they don't understand their customers.
|
| There are tools no one uses, and there are tools people
| constantly complain about.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Figma is an example of a widely used tool most users seem
| to like and praise.
| burningion wrote:
| Have been building a generative video editor and doing
| interviews with enterprise creative cloud users. Basically
| there's a large knowledge investment in their tools, and
| adobe (so far) has shown that their user's knowledge
| investment won't become useless because adobe will continue
| to incorporate the future into their existing knowledge
| stack. Adobe doesn't have to be the best, but just show
| they won't miss the boat entirely with this next generation
| of tools.
| Zetobal wrote:
| People don't want to buy a third of an inch drill, they want
| a third of an inch hole.
| jacky2wong wrote:
| Thanks for linking. I agree and strongly believe product
| companies are in the best position to monetize Gen AI.
| Existing distribution channels + companies being extremely
| fast to add AI features.
|
| Where start-ups like Stability need to be rising to compete
| will have to be AI-native e.g. products re-thought of from
| the ground up like an AI image editor or as foundation-level
| AI research companies, agents or AI infrastructure companies.
|
| There's no reason Stability can't play in both B2B and API if
| planned and strategized well and OpenAI can definitely pull
| it off with their tech and talent. But Stability has a few
| important differentiators from OpenAI where I believe if they
| launch an AI-native product in the multimodal space, they
| stand to differentiate significantly: - People join because
| they believed in Emad's vision of open source so it is their
| job to figure out a commercial model for open source. They
| can retain AI talent by ensuring a commitment to open source
| here. If they need to ensure their moat is retained and can
| commercialize, they should delay releasing model weights
| until a product surrounding the weights has been released
| first. Still open source and open weights but give them time
| to figure out a commercial strategy to capitalize their
| research. However because of this promise, they will not be
| able to license their technology to other companies. -
| Stability's strong research DNA (unsure about their
| engineering) is so badly fumbled by a lack of a cohesive
| product strategy that it leads to sub-par product releases.
| In agreement to the 3 'layers' argument, that's exactly
| Stability's greatest strength and weakness. Their focus on
| foundational models is incredibly strong and has come at the
| cost of the interface layer (and ultimately the data layer as
| it has a flywheel effect).
|
| The company currently screams a need for effective leadership
| that can add on interface and data layers to their product
| strategy so they can build a strong moat outside of a strong
| research team which has shown it can disappear at any
| moment...
| huytersd wrote:
| They tried to ponder to the open source CEO's but as much as
| open source is an ideal, it's a pretty sure way to failure for
| the most part. The only way open source works is if a rich
| company open sources parts of their non revenue forming items.
| dpflan wrote:
| Recent genAI shakeups in the past week:
|
| 1. Inflection AI -- ceo out to MSFT
|
| 2. Stability AI -- ceo out to ____ (infinite sum games? with
| EigenLayer?)
|
| What else? Is there a "GenAI is going great" website yet? (ala
| "web3 is going great": https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/)
| JCM9 wrote:
| 2024 is going to shift into a tough year for AI. Business minded
| folks are already starting to deeply question where the value is
| relative to the amount of money spent on training. Many/most of
| the GenAI companies have interesting ideas but no real business
| plan. Many of the larger AI companies look very shaky in terms of
| their governance and long term stability. Stability is showing
| itself to be very unstable, OpenAI has its mess that still seems
| not fully resolved, Inflection had a bunch of strange stuff go
| down earlier this week, and more to come.
|
| I'm a huge fan of the tech, but as reality sets in things are
| gonna get quite rough and there will need to be a painful culling
| of the AI space before sustainable and long term value
| materializes.
| samstave wrote:
| > _Many /most of the GenAI companies have interesting ideas but
| no real business plan_
|
| -
|
| This is most likely the reason being the SAMA firing, to be
| able to re-align to the MIC without terrible consequence, from
| a PR perspective.
|
| no criticism here aside from the fact that we will see the AI
| killer _fully_ autonomous robots will be here and unfettered by
| 'alignments' much sooner than we expected...
|
| And the MIC is where all the unscrupulous monies without audits
| will come from.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| > no criticism here aside from the fact that we will see the
| AI killer fully autonomous robots will be here and unfettered
| by 'alignments' much sooner than we expected...
|
| What exactly do you mean with this sentence? That less
| woke/regulated companies will suddenly leapfrog the giants
| now? What timeframe are we talking here?
|
| And do you mean for example non public mil applications from
| US/China or whatever or private models from unknown players?
|
| One thing i've been wondering is that if GPT-4 was 100 mil to
| train, then there's really a lot of plutocrats, despots,
| private companies and states for that matter that could in
| principle 10x that amount if they really wanted to go all in,
| and maybe they are right now?
|
| The bottleneck is the talent pool out there though, but i'm
| sure there's a lot people out there from libertarians to
| nation states that don't care about alignment at all, which
| is potentially pretty crazy / exciting / worrying depending
| on view.
| anamax wrote:
| > That less woke/regulated companies will suddenly leapfrog
| the giants now?
|
| What kind of "leapfrog" do you think is necessary to
| produce a "killer fully autonomous robot"?
|
| We've actually had "autonomous killer robots," machines
| that kill based on the outcome of some sensor plus
| processing, for centuries, and fairly sophisticated ones
| have been feasible for decades. (For example it's trivial
| to build a "killer robot" that triggers off of face or
| voice recognition.)
|
| The only thing that's changed recently is the kind of
| decisions and how effectively the robot can go looking for
| someone to kill.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| Of course we're there already sadly. I was just confused
| by the sentence structure.
|
| This video is from 7 years ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk
|
| The interesting thing is who's actively working on this,
| any despots, private companies, foreign nations, who from
| the talent pool, criminal orgs or even western military
| which mostly works for the western elite classes.
| wruza wrote:
| _maybe they are right now?_
|
| Aren't they? Pretty sure that most tactical and strategical
| decisions are automated to the bottom. Drones and cameras
| with all sorts of CV and ML features. You don't need scary
| walking talking androids with red eyes to control
| battlefields and streets. The idea of "Terminator" is
| similar to a mailman on an antigrav bicycle.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Business minded folks are already starting to deeply question
| where the value is relative to the amount of money spent on
| training
|
| Kinda. In my experience, the bigger issue is the skillset has
| largely been diffused.
|
| Overtraining on internal corpora has been more than enough to
| enable automation benefits, and the ecosystem around ML is very
| robust now - 10 years ago SDKs like Scikit-learn or PyTorch
| were much less robust than they are now. Implementing
| commercial grade SVM or <insert_model_here> is fairly
| straightforward now.
|
| ML models have largely been commodified, and for most usecases,
| the process of implementing models fairly straightforward
| internally.
|
| IMO, the real value will be on the infrastructural side of ML -
| how to simply and enhance deployment, how to manage API
| security, how to manage multiple concurrent deployments, how to
| maximize performance, etc.
|
| And I have put my money where my mouth is for this thesis, as
| it is one that has been validated by every peer of mine as
| well.
| JCM9 wrote:
| I agree with you. My reference in business questioning value
| was on the flood of money going into building new models.
| That's where we will see a significant and painful culling
| soon as it's all becoming quite commoditized and there's only
| so much room in the market when that happens. Tooling,
| security services and other things to build on top of a
| commoditized generative AI market opens up other doors for
| products to be built.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > flood of money going into building new models
|
| In my experience, there really hasn't been that significant
| of a flood of money in this space for several years now, or
| at least not to the level I've seen based on discussion
| here on HN.
|
| I think HN tends to skew towards conversations around
| models for some reason, but almost all my peers are either
| funding or working on either tooling or ML driven
| applications since 2021.
|
| -------
|
| I've found HN to have a horrible noise to value signal
| nowadays, and people with experience (eg. My friends in the
| YC community) deviating towards Bookface or in person
| meetups instead now.
|
| There was a flood of new accounts in the 2020-22 period (my
| hunch is it's LessWrong, SSC, and Reddit driven based on
| the inside jokes and posts I've been seeing recently on HN)
| but they don't reflect the actual reality of the industry.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I've been in crypto since 2010 and HN hasn't predicted
| anything. At least with AI the congnoscenti here is on
| board. With crypto / blockchain the current plan is to
| pretend it doesn't exist and never speak of it, as the
| industry never imploded as was long predicted.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Crypto is a mixed bag.
|
| Deep down I fundamentally believe it's a solution
| searching for a problem. That said, if people want to put
| money into it, who am I to judge.
|
| That said, IMO crypto as a growth story is largely done.
| Now that Coinbase has IPOed and the industry consolidated
| or wiped out (eg. Kraken, FTX, OpenSea), it's not as
| attractive an industry anymore unless some actual
| fundamental problems are found that can't be remediated
| by existing financial infrastructure (legal and illegal).
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Hard disagree but even if all of the growth is done, you
| never would have captured a penny of it reading HN. It
| went from "scam" to "ponzi" to "government will surely
| ban it" to "ok it's over no need to look at or speak of
| it".
| alephnerd wrote:
| > government will surely ban it
|
| This is plain hystronics, but regulation is absolutely
| coming and will only help the larger existing players to
| consolidate.
|
| Coinbase, FTX, etc have all seen the writing on the wall
| and are working with regulators on this.
|
| The Wild West days are definetly over now.
|
| If I'd invest in the space, I'd probably look at KYC and
| AML product opportunties such as Chainalysis, but even
| that space has consolidated
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I'm super deep in the space but there is enormous money
| to be made everywhere. Or at least everyone I know is
| searching Zillow...
| alephnerd wrote:
| I'm not denying that there's money in the industry -
| every portion of the software industry can rake cash due
| to the extremely high margins that software has compared
| to just about any other industry.
|
| The magic is finding which subsegments might have even
| higher margins than others.
|
| Crypto used to have fairly high margins, but all the easy
| gains have been claimed by larger firms as it's a much
| more mature industry now, but portions of the ML space
| still have much more opportunity for growth, so it makes
| sense to deploy capital there (this is a very high level
| view so take with a grain of salt - B2C and SMB B2B and
| Enterprise B2B have entirely different GTM motions and
| path to profitability).
|
| But at least for me, I can't justify participating in a
| Series A round for a crypto startup compared to an MLOps
| startup today.
| __loam wrote:
| It's still a scam even if bitcoin is currently benefiting
| from the creation of institutional ETFs. FTX was one of
| the largest financial frauds in history and the founder
| was disgraced and convicted. There's clearly a large
| amount of appetite for regulatory action in government
| right now and afaik the funding in the space has
| completely dried up. What did we get for all that
| trouble? A really inefficiet payments system? "Digital
| Gold"? A fun way to fund terrorists and drug running?
| Crypto proponents are delusional if they think they can
| just shake off the reputational damage they brought onto
| themselves in the past several years.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Funding is through the roof! $300 million seed round
| valuations are happening again
| cr__ wrote:
| It is a scam. It is a Ponzi scheme (subcategory of
| scams).
| Certhas wrote:
| Meh. Crypto is still a waste of resources that had no
| reason to exist. The modern art market hasn't crashed yet
| either, and homoeopathy is booming, too last I checked.
| Just because it's stupid and useless doesn't mean you
| can't sell it. (And if you underestimate the possibility
| of selling useless things, you end up incorrectly
| predicting the demise of the market a lot.)
|
| Not wanting to be part of that is just having some
| morals. Grabbing money where you can isn't a sign of a
| successful life.
| pama wrote:
| I agree that the quality of the posts has decayed
| dramatically since the start of the COVID pandemic and
| lots of the Reddit type memes and upvotes have added
| horrible levels of noise. I can still find gems in it and
| it's still miles ahead of Twitter, but I do question my
| time using it passively and would much rather have a
| smaller and more focused community again.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I do question my time using it passively and would much
| rather have a smaller and more focused community again.
|
| Story of my life.
|
| I have a severe HN addiction that I haven't been able to
| shake off.
| ASinclair wrote:
| > Business minded folks are already starting to deeply question
| where the value is relative to the amount of money spent on
| training.
|
| Not just training but inference too, right? They have to make
| money off each query.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I'm fairly sure this is why there's a rush to get AI related
| capabilities into processors for consumer devices, to offload
| that computing so they don't bear the ongoing cost and it'll
| probably be more responsive to the user.
| JCM9 wrote:
| Yes. Each query needs to generate enough revenue to pay for
| the cost of running the query, a proportional cost of the
| cost to train the original model, overhead, SG&A, etc. just
| to break even. Few have shown a plan to do that or explained
| in a defensible way how they're going to get there.
|
| A challenge at the moment is a lot of the AI movement is led
| by folks that are brilliant technologists but have little to
| no experience running viable businesses or building a viable
| business plan. That was clearly part of why OpenAI has its
| turmoil in that some where trying to be tech purists where
| others knew the whole AI space will implode if it's not a
| viable business. To some degree that seems to behind a lot of
| the recent chaos inside these larger AI companies.
| financltravsty wrote:
| It's always fascinating to see. The business portions are
| much easier to solve for with an engineering mindset, but
| it seems to be a common issue that engineers never take it
| into account.
|
| This is saying nothing about "technologists" (or as they're
| starting to become derided as "wordcels": people that
| communicate well, but cannot execute anything themselves).
|
| It would be... not trivial, but straightforward to map out
| the finances on everything involved, and see if there is
| room from any standpoint (engineering, financial, product,
| etc.) to get queries to breakeven, or even profitable.
|
| But at that point, I believe the answer will be "no, it's
| not possible at the moment." So it becomes a game of
| stalling, and burning more money until R&D finds something
| new that may change that answer (a big _if_ ).
| anon7725 wrote:
| > the whole AI space will implode if it's not a viable
| business
|
| if the Good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise
| hallqv wrote:
| lol Emad was always seemed like an obvious fraud to me. Not quite
| SBF level but same vibe. Whenever someone goes overboard on the
| nerd look it's always a red flag.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Fishy, it was the outsider that obliterated the establishment and
| the current narrative
|
| It was bound to happen anyways..
| narrator wrote:
| You just got to bribe a few key AI researchers to completely
| control the future of humanity, lol.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| 6 months ago, I expressed my doubt about the viability of
| Stability business model on HN News. Mostaque answered the
| questions with a resounding yes and claimed the business of
| Stability.AI is better than ever.
|
| Today he resigned.
| Redster wrote:
| Would you please stop doubting? The consequences are just too
| great. /joke
| sp332 wrote:
| He still owns a ton of stock, and last month said they were on
| track to be cash flow positive this year.
| hankchinaski wrote:
| Bubble starting to burst, history doesn't repeat itself but it
| rhymes
| anon7725 wrote:
| let us hope
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Given all the talk here, it seems like the state of the business
| and the state of the stock market are grossly out of whack. Of
| course, that happens from time to time.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Ah yes the coming winter
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-03-23 23:01 UTC)