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Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Stability AI's CEO, Emad Mostaque, is stepping down.

• Enterprises still want to build with open-source models.

• OpenAI is nudging Hollywood to start using Sora.

• The Financial Times trained a chatbot on all of its articles.

Instability AI.

Emad Mostaque, the controversial CEO of Stable Diffusion—an AI image unicorn—is stepping down. Frankly, we’re hardly surprised.

Hardly surprised cause Stability’s Avengers team has been a revolving door this past year, with key researchers departing just last week.

And yeah, we’ve dubbed them Avengers for a reason…

Stability AI is one of the only companies left that open-sources powerful AI models rather than keeping a lid on them (i.e. they make their ‘AI recipes’ public). Many researchers/devs rely on open-source for building new products, and are now eagerly awaiting Stability’s latest-greatest model SDXL-3:

But impact doesn’t always = profit.

From the get-go, Stability struggled to monetize its open-source products, and there’s nothing VCs like less than cash-out timelines longer than a 30-yr mortgage.

There are all sorts of rumors that Stability’s board might have pushed Mostaque out due to disagreements on whether to commercialize SDXL-3 (meaning, to sell it) instead of making it open-source.

And Stability’s recent sale of Clipdrop to Jasper might have also been part of an effort to get some extra cash in the bank.

BTW: Clipdrop is actually a great editing tool for beginners—it lets you do stuff like remove backgrounds and uncrop photos with a single click:

So is open-source dying? A failed business model? You might be surprised to find out what businesses think. Keep reading…

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Enterprises are still keen on using open-source.

While open-source might not always make for a good business, businesses still want to make open-source models.

Per, a16z, 60% of AI leaders want to increase their usage of open-source in 2024, and 46% prefer open-source models to closed ones.

Why open > closed???

In layman’s terms, businesses want to take a model like ChatGPT, fine-tune it on proprietary data so it’s really good at specific use cases (e.g. finance) and keep that data private from the tech overlords (e.g. Microsoft/OpenAI).

This means fine-tuning models like Llama and Mistral (& possible soon Grok?).

Notice how we said fine-tuning models and not building ones from scratch. a16z correctly points out that most enterprises are focusing on customizing AI models like GPT-4, teaching them to act a specific way with specific data sets.

Read the full report here! 

Around the Horn.

• The Financial Times is testing a chatbot trained on its entire archive of articles.

• Tutorial: How to use Zoom AI Companion for meetings (link).

• OpenAI is encouraging Hollywood execs and directors to start using Sora.

• A Q&A from Matt Shumer on prompting/fine-tuning AI models.

• The BBC is in talks to sell its decades of journalism archives to AI companies.

Treat To Try.

HeyGen is one of those apps that lets you transform one (real or fake) video of a person talking into a gazillion personalized videos, and they’ve just raised $60M.

We suggest trying out HeyGen for businesses engaged in personalized video outreach via email/LinkedIn (think sales / marketing teams).

Fingers crossed that Apple's iOS 18 "major AI update" will finally allow video playback within the Mail app, a feature long overdue.

Monday Meme.

A Cat's Commentary.