Emad also put up ~$20M of his own (real!) money for the initial compute. And released everything as OSS.

Its just sad to see such a negative article.

There are, however, fair questions about valuation and (lack of) moat.

Some of their behaviour over the past year makes me feel the company has a culture which doesn't hold honesty as a core value.

The Runway takedown or something your refer to was Stability sending a takedown request to HuggingFace claiming an IP leak over the publication of version 1.5 by their academic partners Runway. That was sorted out, if you want to call it that, after massive public outcry and Emad claiming it was just confusion on HuggingFace's part. HuggingFace then confirmed Stability's legal team contacted them to retract the request afterward.

Then there was the incident where they contacted Discord to take over the main StableDifussion channel without informing the owner. There was also the incident where they convinced the owner of the main stable diffusion subreddit to give them mod rights and removed all other mods as well as any info and mentions related to one of the most widely used StableDiffusion tool (Automatic1111).

I normally don't like engaging in these things but think should step in given increasing fud.

Stability AI lawyers never contacted HuggingFace requesting an IP takedown. You may ask HuggingFace themselves.

RunwayML agreed not to release 1.5 for safety reasons in writing and then chose to anyone presumably leading to confusion by our tech team who let HF know it couldn't be them.

You can ask them why they did that, Runway being a private company https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2022/12/05/runway-ml...

Three of the 5 authors of latent diffusion including the two lead authors are at Stability AI.

On the Discord it was Discord themselves that did it to the puzzlement of Kaarsetun and I, we are good with each other.

On the Subreddit that was our fault completely, for which I did a public apology around the issues with Automatic1111.

Hugging Face themselves did say the takedown request was not a formal legal request from the get go:

"Company StabilityAI has requested a takedown of this published model characterizing it as a leak of their IP

While we are awaiting for a formal legal request, and even though Hugging Face is not knowledgeable of the IP agreements (if any) between this repo owner (RunwayML) and StabilityAI, we are flagging this repository as having potential/disputed IP rights. [...]"

They didn't hint at an account hijacking by a third party if that's what your team intended to convey to them however.

To add to that, your CIO addressed the community at the time and characterized RunwayML in the following terms: "[...] We also won't stand by quietly when other groups leak the model in order to draw some quick press to themselves while trying to wash their hands of responsibility."

> I don't remember Stability claiming in any public forum that they solely developed Stable Diffusion

This article makes no such claim. It is about whether or not investors knew.

Oh, those poor investors! It would be absolutely unreasonable to expect them to evaluate the business fundamentals of their investments; it’s not as if that’s literally their entire job.

Investors probably shouldn't be chucking $100m+ at startups without doing the bare minimum of DD if that's the point of contention here...

You can't pin it on investors, when founders deliberately schedule fundraising rounds tightly not to give investors time to think. This benefits the founder, but if they pull a fast one, investors will lose trust and be less lenient towards the next founder. Trust is a pillar of the venture capital ecosystem.

Don't say buyer beware.