Emad Mostaque at the DLD Munich Conference 2024. Image: Sebastian Gabriel/picture alliance for DLD/Hubert Burda Media/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Emad Mostaque said centralised AI won’t be beaten with ‘more centralised AI’, but some reports suggest he was also facing quarrels with Stability AI investors before resigning.
Stability AI is facing a change in leadership, as founder Emad Mostaque resigned from his role as CEO and from the company’s board of directors over the weekend.
The AI start-up has appointed its COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as the company’s interim co-CEOs while it searches for a replacement for Mostaque. Stability AI said Mostaque left the company to “pursue decentralised AI”.
Mostaque explained the reason for his departure further on his X profile, where he said that we are “not going to beat centralised AI with more centralised AI”. He also claimed that his shares at Stability AI hold the “majority of vote” and full board control.
“We should have more transparent and distributed governance in AI as it becomes more and more important,” Mostaque said. “It’s a hard problem, but I think we can fix it.”
Mostaque’s departure comes during a busy period for the AI company, as it recently unveiled plans to shake up the generative video sector with Stable Video 3D, which it claims can turn still images into 3D objects and videos.
“I am proud two years after bringing on our first developer to have led Stability to hundreds of millions of downloads and the best models across modalities,” Mostaque said in a Stability AI statement. “I believe strongly in Stability AI’s mission and feel the company is in capable hands. It is now time to ensure AI remains open and decentralised.”
Stability AI faced a tumultuous 2023 however, as more than 10 senior executives left the London-headquartered start-up, according to a report from Sifted.
One of them was Ed Newton-Rex, who led the audio team at Stability AI. Newton-Rex cited his disagreement with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is “fair use” as his reason for resigning.
The start-up also faced growing pressure from investors towards the end of 2023 and was even looking at potential buyers to acquire the company, according to Bloomberg. This report also claimed Mostaque was in disputes with investors.
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Emad Mostaque at the DLD Munich Conference 2024. Image: Sebastian Gabriel/picture alliance for DLD/Hubert Burda Media via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
