“ In reality, Mostaque has a bachelor’s degree, not a master’s degree from Oxford. The hedge fund’s banner year was followed by one so poor that it shut down months later. The U.N. hasn’t worked with him for years. And while Stable Diffusion was the main reason for his own startup Stability AI’s ascent to prominence, its source code was written by a different group of researchers. “Stability, as far as I know, did not even know about this thing when we created it,” Björn Ommer, the professor who led the research, told Forbes. “They jumped on this wagon only later on.” “
“ “What he is good at is taking other people’s work and putting his name on it, or doing stuff that you can’t check if it’s true.”
Emad had the genius idea of essentially paying for the branding rights to an AI model. This was viewed as insane in the pre-ChatGPT era, and only paid off massively in retrospect.
Also all those 'controversies' were mostly the result of an aggrieved co-founder/investor who decided to sell their shares before SD1.4's success. Emad may not have proven to be competent enough to run an large AI lab in the long run, but those complaints are just trivial 'controversies'.
They are saying it was not clear "buying branding rights to an image model" would lead to any investments, any kind of high valuation, or any other financial success. It is only clear in hindsight.
Maybe… he certainly was good at taking credit for it. Not course if they stepped in, rebranded something they didn’t make and threw a bunch of AwS GPUs they couldn’t actually afford at it though
People forget, moving things around and funding them and making it all work is what makes an entrepreneur. Elon Musk did that and all great founders do that. Emad doesn't have to write the code himself.
Thats a hit piece, but whatever, isn't that what the most prominent/funded academics do? As far as i know he is known generally as CEO of the company that makes SD, not as the creator of SD. It does look like without him these models wouldnt have evolved so much
> What he is good at is taking other people’s work and putting his name on it, or doing stuff that you can’t check if it’s true.
I have to say, this is a quite common ignorant statement that's said about almost every CEO.
I'm not sure if there's more to it in this particular case, but no, CEOs aren't stealing your work. Similarly, marketers aren't parasites. Designers aren't there to waste your time. Many engineers seem to hold similar belief that others are holding them down or taking advantage of their work. This is just a congnitive bias.
Emad jumped on the train after the major inventions were invented and PoCs were made. He could not have contributed to them unless he had a time machine. (Yes he contributed to the training costs of SD1.4 but the time point when he made the decision was not early research.)
You made a point about devs underappreciating the work of other professionals, like CEOs and designers. You made this point in the context of Emad and the success story that is Stable Diffusion. The implication in your point is that Emad surely contributed to the success, even though the CEO is not a developer or researcher. My counter to your point is that Emad wasn't there when the inventions were made. He joined the party after success was already evident. Emad's main contribution to the success of Stable Diffusion is that he funded the training of a large model. That's great, but this thing would've happened with or without him. The inventions were made before he funded the training of SD1.4.
If Emad had been supporting the research team from the beginning, one might argue that he created the conditions for their success, or whatever. But he wasn't there at that time.
None of this is related to whatever Emad is accused of. I'm just making a point about how we attribute contribution for success.
This is 100% correct. Emad tried to lure me into the trap that Eleuther eventually fell into, and I lucked out by blowing him off after getting weird vibes from him. This was back when he was unknown, but was running around offering a bunch of researchers massive GPU cluster time for seemingly altruistic reasons but were in fact creepy reasons. In reality he wanted his name on their work.
I have the DMs to prove this, and have not ever said something like this about someone. I wouldn’t make this accusation lightly, for whatever it’s worth. In the HN discussion of that article, I had left a comment, which Emad DMed me on Twitter about, saying no no, he never lied to investors, and tried to convince me that what I was saying wasn’t true. I was wondering why he cared so much. In retrospect it’s probably because it was correct.
I’ve never worked with him, to be clear, and the few colleagues who have worked at Stability have had generally positive things to say. But there was one that was screwed over by them hard (he was doing contract work, and never got paid for it), and I can think of at least four other alarming data points that all point to the same thing.
It’s unsettling not knowing whether to speak up about this. On one hand it doesn’t really matter that much. On the other hand, it’s the fundamental difference between a CEO that tends to IPO vs one that tends to fail. I hate seeing people fail, and I genuinely thought that my feelings about Emad were mistaken since empirically they were doing fine. Turns out, nope, not fine, and the original impression was right. Weird experience.
Not surprised at all to see how unpopular this sentiment is on HN. For some reason HN seems to love one dimensional stereotypes for every job that isn't theirs.
Actually that's wrong, even the idea that engineers are smarter than managers is very prevalent here.
“ In reality, Mostaque has a bachelor’s degree, not a master’s degree from Oxford. The hedge fund’s banner year was followed by one so poor that it shut down months later. The U.N. hasn’t worked with him for years. And while Stable Diffusion was the main reason for his own startup Stability AI’s ascent to prominence, its source code was written by a different group of researchers. “Stability, as far as I know, did not even know about this thing when we created it,” Björn Ommer, the professor who led the research, told Forbes. “They jumped on this wagon only later on.” “
“ “What he is good at is taking other people’s work and putting his name on it, or doing stuff that you can’t check if it’s true.”