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Stability AI, the company that funds open source music and image generation systems such as Dance Broadcast and Stable Broadcast, announced today that it has raised $101 million in funding led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from O’Shaughnessy Ventures. LLC. According to a Bloomberg source, it values the company at $1 billion and comes as demand for AI-powered content generation continues to grow.
Stability AI is the brainchild of CEO Imad Mostak. Graduated from Oxford with a Masters in Mathematics and Computer Science, he served as an analyst at various hedge funds before moving into more public-facing careers. He co-founded Stality AI in 2020 and is motivated by the personal interest in AI and the lack of an “organization” in the open source AI community.
“No one but our employees has any say — no billionaires, big funds, governments or anything else controlling the company or the communities we support. We’re completely independent,” Mostak told TechCrunch in a previous interview. We plan to accelerate.”
Stability AI has a cluster of over 4,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs running in AWS, which it uses to train AI systems, including stable distribution. It’s expensive to maintain — Business Insider reports that Stability AI’s operations and cloud costs exceed $50 million. But Mostaque reiterated that the company’s R&D will enable it to train more efficient models in the future.
The company’s work has not escaped controversy, it is worth noting. Stable Diffusion’s open source releases have been used to create content such as graphic violence and pornography, deeply fake content of non-consensual celebrities. Stability AI was the subject of a recent critical letter by US House Representative Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) to the National Security Adviser (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, in which she urged the NSA and OSTP. Release “insecure AI models” that “do not host content created on their platforms”.
A set of images created by Stable Diffusion.
Stability AI has taken an unmediated approach to date, offering filtering tools with an open-source stable distribution package but allowing users and companies to deploy the system however they want, as long as they follow the company’s licensing terms. “A percentage of people are simply unpleasant and strange, but that’s humanity,” Moustak said in a previous interview. “Of course, it is our belief that this technology will become widespread, and the paternalistic and somewhat condescending attitude of many AI enthusiasts is misplaced by not trusting society.”
Stability AI plans to make money by training “personal” models for customers and as an overall infrastructure layer. In addition, DreamStudio offers a platform and API where the models can be accessed by individual users – Mostaque told Bloomberg that DreamStudio has more than 1.5 million users who have created more than 1.5 million images, and a stable distribution of more than 10 million daily users. “Across all channels.”
Meanwhile, the open source version of Stable Diffusion has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, according to a press release issued by Stability AI this morning.
According to Mostaque, capital from the funding will support the widespread deployment of custom versions of Stable Diffusion to users and investment in supercomputing power. It will also hire more people: Mostaque said he expects to grow from 100 to about 300 employees next year.
Stability AI has recently brought in several high-profile research scientists From Google Brain and futurist and public speaker Daniel Jeffries.
Beyond Stable Diffusion, Stability AI says it has other commercialized projects, including AI models for generating audio, language, “3D” and even video. One of them is the aforementioned dance distribution, an algorithm that can generate music clips by training hundreds of hours of existing songs.
“At Coatue, we believe open source AI technologies have the power to unlock human creativity and achieve greater good,” Sri Viswanath, general partner of Coatue, said in a statement. Stability AI is a big idea that dreams beyond the rapid implementation of AI. We are excited to be a part of the Stability AI journey, and look forward to seeing what the world creates with Stable AI technology.
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