Funding Alert

Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI raises $101 million in funding


With involvement from O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC, Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Stability AI, the firm sponsoring the development of open source music and image-generating algorithms like Dance Diffusion and Stable Diffusion, revealed today that it has raised $101 million. According to a Bloomberg source, the tranche puts the company at $1 billion post-money and comes as demand for AI-powered content development increases.

The founder and CEO of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, is headquartered in San Francisco and London. After earning a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from Oxford, he worked as an analyst at many hedge firms before focusing on projects with a larger audience.

In 2020, Mostaque co-founded and bootstrapped Stability AI, spurred primarily by his own interest in AI as well as what he perceived to be a lack of “structure” among the open source AI community.

No billionaires, hedge funds, governing bodies, or other individuals in positions of authority within the company or within the communities we assist have any voting rights; only our employees do. We are totally independent,” Mostaque previously told . We intend to use our computing power to speed up open source, fundamental AI.

With more than 4,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs running on AWS, Stability AI has a cluster that it utilises to train AI systems like Stable Diffusion. The cost of operations and cloud expenses for Stability AI reportedly approached $50 million.But Mostaque has often argued that the organization’s R&D will provide it the ability to train models more effectively in the future.

It’s important to note that the company’s work hasn’t been free of controversy. Stable Diffusion’s open source version has been exploited to produce offensive content including pornographic celebrity deepfakes and graphic violence. And out of concern about infringement lawsuits, Getty Images prohibited the submission of content created by systems like Stable Diffusion.

Stability Even U.S. House Representative Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) recently criticised AI in a letter to the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), urging them to address the release of “unsafe AI models” that “do not regulate content generated by humans on their platforms.”

Stability AI

Stability AI has so far maintained a mostly hands-off approach to moderation; the open source Stable Diffusion package includes filtering capabilities, but users and businesses are free to use the system however they see fit as long as they adhere to the rules of the company’s licence. In a prior interview, Mostaque claimed that “some people are just plain rude and odd, but that’s humanity.” Indeed, we think that this technology will be widely used, and that many AI enthusiasts are wrong in their paternalistic and somewhat condescending attitude toward society.

Stability By developing “private” models for clients and serving as a broad infrastructure layer, AI intends to generate revenue. Additionally, it provides a platform and API called DreamStudio that let individual users access its models — According to Mostaque, Stable Diffusion has more than 10 million daily users “across all channels” and DreamStudio has more than 1.5 million users who have generated over 170 million photos.

According to a news statement sent by Stability AI this morning, more than 200,000 people have downloaded the open source version of Stable Diffusion.

According to Mostaque, the funds from the investment round will help purchasing more supercomputing power and distributing customized versions of Stable Diffusion to consumers on a bigger scale. Additionally, it will be used to expand the company’s workforce, which Mostaque estimates would increase from 100 to around 300 over the course of the following year.

Recent high-profile hires at Stability AI include futurist and public speaker Daniel Jeffries and research experts from Google Brain.

In addition to Stable Diffusion, Stability AI asserts to be working on additional commercially viable technologies, such as AI models for producing audio, text, “3D,” and even video. One of these is the aforementioned Dance Diffusion algorithm and toolkit, which can create musical clips by learning from hundreds of hours of previously recorded music.

“At Coatue, we think that open source AI technologies have the capacity to empower human creativity and create a greater good,” said Sri Viswanath, a general partner at the company. The concept of stability AI is expansive and looks beyond the current uses of AI. We are eager to join Stability AI on its adventure and are interested to see what the world will do with its technology.

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