Valuation of the company behind Stable Diffusion climbs to $6.9 billion, just one month after the project's launch

Obviously, the open source thing has brought Stable Diffusion a lot of attention, but also a lot of trouble. The fact that the code is on GitHub makes it easy for someone to copy Stable Diffusion.

Not long ago, a company made a pirated version of Stable Diffusion, called Photosonic AI, and it ranked #2 on Product Hunt.

Stable Diffusion is based on a paper from CVPR2022, "High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models," developed by researchers at the University of Munich's Machine Vision and Learning Research Group and Runway, and in collaboration with other community The team developed an open-source model based on a CVPR2022 paper, "High Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models," and in collaboration with other community teams.

Stability AI has not yet provided a clear business model. Currently, most of the company's funding comes directly from founder and CEO Imad Mostak.

He is now 39 years old and graduated from Oxford University in 2005 with a master's degree in mathematics and computer science. In 2019, he co-founded Symmitree, a project aimed at reducing the cost of using smartphones and accessing the Internet for people (though it seems to be closed now).

In 2020, he officially co-founded Stability AI, whose mission is to "build open source AI projects" and which, in addition to Stable Diffusion, supports other tools being developed by open source groups.

In an interview on the tube, Mostak revealed that they have already partnered with the government and other agencies, and have negotiated many orders to sell their technology. And he added that the first phase of training the model cost just $6 million, "a fraction of the company's funding.

The model training was done on a 4,000-strong A100 Ezra-1 AI supercluster, according to the company. Mostak said the company was previously completely independent, with no controlling party other than its 75 employees.

Now they're taking a 10 percent stake in the company at a $1 billion valuation to attract investors, and well-known venture capital firms like Lightspeed and Coatue are strong contenders for that seat.

One More Thing

It's worth noting that Stability AI is reminiscent of OpenAI because of its open source advocacy, and after receiving investment from Microsoft, OpenAI turned into a for-profit organization and began to focus on commercializing the technology, which led to some criticism.

However, Stability AI seems to have been a for-profit company from the start, with founder Mostak saying, "So that open source projects can reach more people."