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Months after Stability AI's founder and former CEO stepped down under a cloud of suspicion, the generative AI startup has a new full-time CEO.
According to one report: informationPrem Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, will become the new CEO of Stability AI. Akkaraju has served as CEO of Weta Digital since January 2020 and is also co-founder and chairman of Screening Room. Stability AI declined to comment publicly on VentureBeat's report.
The news comes about three months after Stability AI founder and former CEO Emad Mostakeh stepped down in March. Since then, the company has brought on Stability's COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as interim co-CEOs.
One of the reasons for Mostake's departure was investor concerns about the company's financial viability and business operations. Mostake founded Stability AI in 2019 to help advance AI. Stability AI is best known for its text-to-image AI technology, Stable Diffusion, which the company has continuously improved. On June 12, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium was released as the fastest and more capable version of the company's text-to-image model.
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Stability AI lost more than $30 million in the first quarter of this year on less than $5 million in revenue, according to a Reuters report published May 16. The report also said that Stability AI is seeking outside investment. information Stability AI also claims that along with a new CEO, it will be receiving a capital infusion from a group of investors led by Sean Parker.
Stability AI Models and Business Growth
Stable AI has faced increasing competitive pressures over the past year. In the image generation space where Stable Diffusion exists, the likes of OpenAI's Dall-E 3, Midjourney, and Ideogram are increasingly commoditizing the market.
But Stability AI is diversifying beyond just image generation: the company is also developing a code model called Stable Code, which had a major release earlier this year. Stability AI also has a text-large language model called Stable LM, with multiple model sizes, including 1.6 billion, 3 billion, and 7 billion parameter models.
Audio and video are also areas where Stability AI is active: Stable Audio 2.0 was released on April 3rd, allowing users to generate up to three minutes of audio, while Stable Video provides a set of features for generating video from text, including the ability to do 3D with Stable Video 3D (SV3D).
Underpinning all these AI models is an updated business model that debuted late last year. In December 2023, Stability AI announced a membership model based on the basic idea that organizations that want to use the technology commercially must pay a membership fee. Stability AI continues to offer a portion of some of its model weights under a non-commercial license.
Beyond its membership offering, the company also makes the service accessible via an API, which organizations pay for based on usage, either directly or through interfaces such as the Stable Artisan Discord bot, which launched on May 9.
Stability AI founder tackles next milestone
Stability AI now has a new CEO, but the previous CEO remains very busy.
Mostaque revealed on X (formerly Twitter) that he is working on a new venture called Schelling AI. At this time, not much is known about Schelling AI other than that it aims to help advance Mostaque's vision for decentralized AI.
Mostake told VentureBeat that more details about what Schelling AI actually does will be revealed in July.
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