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- 😺 Stability CEO resigns
😺 Stability CEO resigns
PLUS: you'll be shocked at this AI report!
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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.
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Instability AI.
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Emad Mostaque
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:
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Stable Diffusion
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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FROM OUR PARTNERS
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They’ve helped businesses create products like AI clothing marketplaces and a chatbot for historical figures (seriously, check out how cool some of these products are).
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/e9babe9d-b082-49a2-a243-52005dc57306/Neuron-Page-Splitters5.png)
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.
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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.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/4c9837e3-9d36-4b67-ac79-59fc1992cdda/Neuron-Page-Splitters6.png)
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.
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Monday Meme.
A Cat's Commentary.
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