[dpiers]

This story by itself might sound like sour grapes, but in combination with other reports about the CEO(1), I suspect bad news ahead for Stability's investors.

It seems like a narcissist with a very 'dynamic' relationship with the truth chased the AI hype train and ended up with a bunch of money and attention due to a stupid VC. He pissed off the teams that invented Latent Diffusion and his partners at RunwayML in the process, and now it seems like his cofounder as well. What value is there in a company that's only famous because they spent $600k in VC money training an open source model on AWS?

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/06/04/stable-di...

[kristopolous]

The finance side of the AI boom is just the crypto bros chasing a new hustle.

Before that they were the Uber for x/y as a service people.

It's a shame we can't get things financed without these PT Barnum clown cars

[devjab]

I'm not convinced they are throwing money at nothing this time. If you look into my post history (don't, I'll give you a tl/dr) you can see me being fairly critical about the state of LLMs, but also that I find them incredibly useful for some things. GPT basically writes 95% of our documentation now, only the code we absolutely don't want to share with the internet is still be documented by hand. And that is just a tiny bit of how the new AI boom is actually useful. My wife works with dyslexic people, and the amount of usability AI has in terms of turning the written word into audio is outright amazing. I'm sure this will be hard on a lot of voice actors, copy writers and so on, but AI can do those jobs and a lot of other things.

To me that means that, unlike blockchain, there is actually a viable product behind all the AI hype, and unlike Uber companies have already started selling it rather than waiting for it to become profitable through scale.

Maybe it's just me but the AI hype reminds me a lot more of the dotcom era than any of the recent hype cycles. Of course this means that for every Amazon or Google there will be 9 million failures, and unlike the dotcom era, it's likely that it'll be Google (or most likely Microsoft) who hits the jackpot, meaning it'll be even harder to find the right investment opportunities this time, but I don't think it's a fad.

[kristopolous]

Right. It's not a discount to the science or discipline but instead to the weird used car men snake oil games we need to play to move the money around.

The royal society and other 18th century science institutions had similar problems. Carnival barkers would shock people with leyden jars, hidden wires and do Stephen Grays flying boy experiment as an amusement to raise money to do actual legitimate science.

Some of the early Copley medal winners were impoverished borderline homeless people who couldn't afford the membership dues to scientific societies. They've got like scientific theories and galaxies named after them today

In Japan, the government has a special status for accomplished people where you get a lifetime monthly stipend so that, say fine poets can write poetry without worrying money. (人間国宝: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_National_Treasure_(Ja...)

It'd be nice if things that were valued could be funded without having to hustle so much

[TheNewsIsHere]

I have often thought that the current AI hype is a perfect example in some intersection of i) tragedy of the commons; ii) the idea that you don’t have to be smart or skilled to make money; and iii) new fools and new shills are born every minute.

[fsckboy]

it would actually be pretty cool if we could run Uber Pool with PT Barnum clown cars!

[kristopolous]

Knowing Uber, they'd probably force the drivers to listen to the Benny Hill Theme on a loop.

[whywhywhywhy]

This article is really weird. Am I the only one asking who he pissed off or is a threat to for such a weird article listing off things like over half of all founders do as misdeeds.

Very low quality if not full on paid for “journalism”. Putting only loosely connected logos on a deck? Gimme a break, happens every day in every office in the world.

[__loam]

Yeah I've only ever heard he is a shady ass hole. He's definitely a coattail rider.

[gumby]

Please, the polite MBA term for this is "fast follower". Why do you hate MBAs?

Their schooling gives them greater freedom of action than you because they have learned to be free of pesky ethics.

[H8crilA]

As I understand the article describes fraud, which has little to do with being a good or a bad player. Fraud is a crime. Assuming, of course, that the article is truthful.

[Al0neStar]

2: https://decrypt.co/147191/no-human-programmers-five-years-ai...