The AI Founder Taking Credit For Stable Diffusion's Success Has A History Of Exaggeration - For...

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The AI Founder Taking Credit For Stable Diffusion's Success Has A History Of Exaggeration - Forbes

Stability AI became a $1 billion company with the help of a viral AI text-to-image generator and — per interviews with more than 30 people — some misleading claims from founder Emad Mostaque. By Kenrick Cai Iain Martin , Forbes Staff Emad Mostaque is the modern-day Renaissance man who kicked off the AI gold rush. The Oxford master’s degree holder is an award-winning hedge fund manager, a trusted confidant to the United Nations and the tech founder behind Stable Diffusion — the text-to-image generator that broke the internet last summer and, in his words, pressured OpenAI to launch ChatGPT, the bot that mainstreamed AI. Now he’s one of the faces of the generative AI wave and has secured more than $100 million to pursue his vision of building a truly open AI that he dreams will transform Hollywood, democratize education and vanquish PowerPoint. “Hopefully they’ll give me a Nobel Peace Prize for that,” he joked in a January interview with Forbes. At least, that’s the way that he tells the story. 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.” These aren’t the only misleading stories Mostaque, 40, has told to maneuver himself to the forefront of what some are calling the greatest technological sea change since the internet — despite having no formal experience in the field of artificial intelligence. Interviews with 13 current and former employees and more than two dozen investors, collaborators and former colleagues, as well as pitch decks and internal documents, suggest his recent success has been bolstered by exaggeration and dubious claims. After Stable Diffusion went viral last summer, blue-chip venture capital firms Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners poured in $100 million, giving Mostaque’s London-based startup a $1 billion valuation. By October, Stable Diffusion had 10 million daily users, Mostaque told Bloomberg. In May, the White House named Stability alongside Microsoft and Nvidia as one of the seven “leading AI developers” which would collaborate on a landmark federal AI safety initiative. Mostaque recently dined with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; reclusive Google cofounder Sergey Brin made a rare public appearance at Stability’s ritzy launch party in San Francisco last October. Mostaque’s vision for open-source AI has mesmerized other longtime technologists. “He’s probably the most visionary person I've ever met,” says Christian Cantrell, who left a two-decade career at Adobe to join Stability in October (he quit six months later and launched his own startup). More premier talent has followed since the cash injection last summer. Among the 140-person staff: a vice president of research and development who was a Nvidia director; another research head who came from Google Brain; and three Ph.D. students from Ommer’s lab.
But to build buzz around Stability, Mostaque made an elaborate gambit supported by exaggerated claims and promises, overstating his role in several major AI projects and embellishing a quotidian transaction with the notoriously uncompromising Amazon into a “strategic partnership” with an 80% discount. AI researchers with whom Mostaque worked told Forbes he claimed credit he did not earn or deserve. And when pressed, Stability spokesperson Motez Bishara admitted to Forbes that Stability had no special deal with Amazon.
Mostaque’s other mischaracterizations to investors include multiple fundraising decks seen by Forbes that presented the OECD, WHO and World Bank as Stability’s partners at the time — which all three organizations deny. Bishara said the company could not comment on the presentations “without knowing the exact version,” bu...