[Havoc]

>what official affiliation there was between Stability and EleutherAI, they said: “None.”

That's wild. Handing out a bunch of cash for nothing except vague association. No control? No equity? No IP?

Reminds me of marketing. Cola puts logos on t-shirts of players and proclaims to have sponsored them, but I have yet to see cola claim to have "co-scored" a goal.

[emadm]

This is dumb.

We employed Eleuther team members as Stability AI employees/contractors and incubated them until the 501(c)3 was set up and we managed to bring in other funders too: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/02/stability-ai-hugging-face-...

I am on the board and delighted to continue to support their work as an independent organisation for LM evaluation, alignment and interpretability which is much needed.

Indeed though our approach was handing out significant compute for no control, no equity, no IP.

Anyone who has received Stability AI grants will be able to attest to this with multiple breakthroughs as a result, for example funding https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM, the work of https://github.com/lucidrains and others.

Similarly we funded the beta of MidJourney with a cash grant for compute without ever even floating asking for equity etc as it is a market-creating innovation.

At the time MidJourney was using cc12m_1, a model developed by one of our lead (employed) generative AI developers Katherine Crownson / RiversHaveWings (https://github.com/crowsonkb/v-diffusion-pytorch)

Our model is simply to take open innovation and create commercial variants of that (our stable series models) from scratch and on our own, plus variants of that for private data - https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1649152422634221593?s=2...

This means we can be hands off versus other funders and trust researchers and help them succeed, something others do not.

[anonylizard]

All AI companies used to release their top tier research into the open. Google doesn't have control/equity/IP over the transformer paper.

GPT-J and co are GPT-2 equivalents, that are not actually useful in any way. So its more just building up the open source ecosystem.

Stability did get the branding rights to SD1.4, they spent a few million to get incredible name recognition out of nowhere, in the hottest and most competitive tech space ever. Those sponsored alphago tournaments costed way more and had less reputational impact than the millions using SD every day.

[Havoc]

> Google doesn't have control/equity/IP over the transformer paper.

A model is not a paper and the transformer paper isn't what keeps the lights on in Mountain view. (Nor alphago for that matter.)

Agree on the incredible name recognition, but that's a mighty fragile thing if not built on sound foundation. Even a slight breeze like this article can make it wobble

It'll probably work given how everyone is falling over each other trying to give AI-anything money, but still gives me strong dot com era vibes. Appearance first, substance perhaps later.