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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI's popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque's downfall – because he couldn’t find a way to pay for them.
According to an extensive exposé citing company documents and dozens of persons familiar with the matter, it's indicated that the British model builder's extreme infrastructure costs drained its coffers, leaving the biz with just $4 million in reserve by last October.
It's not clear whether those bills were ultimately paid, but it's reported that the company – once valued at a billion dollars – weighed delaying tax payments to the UK government rather than skimping on its American payroll and risking legal penalties.
By late 2023, venture capital outfit Lightspeed had reportedly raised alarm bells expressing its shock after discovering the poor state of Stability's cash flow, which apparently had not previously been disclosed.
The situation came to a head late last month when Mostaque revealed on social media he had resigned stating that "the concentration of power in AI is bad for us all," and that in order to address it he had "decided to step down to fix this at Stability and elsewhere."
Even if the biz manages to turn its financials around, it's still facing down multiple copyright infringement cases brought by Getty and other artists, who allege their works were used without permission to train its signature model.
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