Stability AI Is Bleeding High-Profile Employees

After a bombastic expose on the state of affairs at Stability AI, the company is now bleeding top executives. The company behind Stable Diffusion has now lost David Ha, its head of research, and Ren Ito, its Chief Operating Officer. This comes after another high profile VP left the company just a few months prior. 

Following the report and its accompanying backlash, it seems that Mostaque is eager to rejig the upper management of the company. When approached for comments regarding Ito’s firing, Mostaque stated that it was part of a ‘broader shake-up at the company’. Earlier this year, Christian Cantrell, the VP of Product for Stability AI, also left the startup to start his own. 

The piece exposed Mostaque’s purported shady business practices, with an anonymous Stability employee stating, “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.”

After a funding round late last year for $101 million, Stability is scaling up its workforce. The company has not only expanded its headcount to over 185, but has also hired Ty Walrod and Afraj Gill to head up growth efforts for the company. In a tweet, Mostaque emphasised on the need to ‘scale right’. 

Stability AI has also come under fire for taking credit for the Stable Diffusion algorithm. Reportedly, the model was created by the University of Heidelberg, with the code being released in 2021. This means that Stability does not possess any ownership rights to the model. 
The company is currently in the midst of updating Stable Diffusion, recently releasing Stable Diffusion XL v0.9. It also open-sourced StableLM, a GPT-like LLM which can be used for both commercial and research purposes.