[jacky2wong]

I think Stability is in an interesting situation. A few suggestions on its direction and current state: 1. Stability AI's loss of talent at the foundational research layer is worrying. They've lost an incredibly expensive moat and there's enough unsolved problems in the foundation layer (faster models, more energy efficient models, etc.) to ensure Stability provides differentiated offerings. Step 1 should be rectifying the core issues of employment and refocusing this more into the AI lab space. I have no doubt this will require a re-steering of the ship and re-focusing of the "mission". 2. Stability AI's "mission" of building models for every modality everywhere has caused the company to lose focus. Resources are spread thin. With $100M in funding, there should be a pointed focus in certain areas - such as imaging or video. Midjourney has shown there is sufficient value capture already in just 1 modality. E.g. StableLM seems like early revenue rush and a bad bet with poor differentiation. 3. There is sufficient competition on the API layer. Stability's commitment to being open-source will continue to entice researchers and developers but there should be a re-focus on improvements in the applied layer. Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack for image generation or video generation would be a great focal point for Stability that separates itself from the competition. People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves their problems.

[achow]

> Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack for image generation or video generation would be a great focal point for Stability that separates itself from the competition. People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves their problems.

Recently, during an interview [1], when questioned about OpenAI's Sora, Shantanu Narayen (Adobe CEO) gave an interesting perspective on where value is created. His view (paraphrased generously)..

GenAI entails 3 'layers': Data, Foundational Models and the Interface Layer.

Why Sora may not be a big threat is because Adobe operates not only at first two layers (Data and Foundational model) but also at the interface layer. Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker, but I guess most importantly they already have moviemakers as their customers.

So product companies like Adobe (& Microsoft, Google etc.) are in better position to monetize GenAI. Pure-play AI companies like OpenAI are perhaps in B2B business. Actually, they maybe really in api business, they would have great data, would be building great foundational models and giving results of those as APIs; which other companies who are closer to their unique set of customers with their unique needs would be able to monetize and some part of those $$ flows back to pure-play AI companies

[1] At 5 mins mark.. https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/02/20/adobe-ceo-shantanu-nar...

[jacky2wong]

Thanks for linking. I agree and strongly believe product companies are in the best position to monetize Gen AI. Existing distribution channels + companies being extremely fast to add AI features.

Where start-ups like Stability need to be rising to compete will have to be AI-native e.g. products re-thought of from the ground up like an AI image editor or as foundation-level AI research companies, agents or AI infrastructure companies.

There's no reason Stability can't play in both B2B and API if planned and strategized well and OpenAI can definitely pull it off with their tech and talent. But Stability has a few important differentiators from OpenAI where I believe if they launch an AI-native product in the multimodal space, they stand to differentiate significantly: - People join because they believed in Emad's vision of open source so it is their job to figure out a commercial model for open source. They can retain AI talent by ensuring a commitment to open source here. If they need to ensure their moat is retained and can commercialize, they should delay releasing model weights until a product surrounding the weights has been released first. Still open source and open weights but give them time to figure out a commercial strategy to capitalize their research. However because of this promise, they will not be able to license their technology to other companies. - Stability's strong research DNA (unsure about their engineering) is so badly fumbled by a lack of a cohesive product strategy that it leads to sub-par product releases. In agreement to the 3 'layers' argument, that's exactly Stability's greatest strength and weakness. Their focus on foundational models is incredibly strong and has come at the cost of the interface layer (and ultimately the data layer as it has a flywheel effect).

The company currently screams a need for effective leadership that can add on interface and data layers to their product strategy so they can build a strong moat outside of a strong research team which has shown it can disappear at any moment...

[Hendrikto]

> Not only Adobe perhaps knows better than anyone else what is need and workflow of a moviemaker

I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and their UI/UX and how they don’t understand their customers.

Never really used any of their products myself though. Maybe they still are best-in-class. I can’t tell.

[whywhywhywhy]

Many years ago it was a good offering but it’s becoming increasingly clear with outsourcing and talent drain that the current teams working on the likes of Photoshop, After Effects and Premier do not actually understand how the core tool, both in its inner workings or even how it draws its own UI works at all and couldn’t either recreate it or even change its existing behavior.

Every major change in the last 6 years has either been weird window dressing changes to welcome panels or new document panels, in all cases building sluggish jank heavy interfaces, try navigating to a folder in the premier one and weep as clicks take actual seconds to recognize.

Or just silly floating tooltips like the ones in Photoshop that also take a second to visible draw in.

All tangible tool changes exist outside the interface or you jump to a web interface in a window and back with the results being passed between in a way that makes it very obvious the developers are trying to avoid touching the core tools code.

Very clear Narayens outsourcing and not being a product guy has lead to this

[orbital-decay]

It's been like this since at least late 90s. At this point Photoshop is similar to Windows in that it has at least 6 mismatching UIs from 6 different eras in it. (or maybe more)

[oldgradstudent]

> I only ever heard creatives complain about Adobe and their UI/UX and how they don’t understand their customers.

There are tools no one uses, and there are tools people constantly complain about.

[Hendrikto]

Figma is an example of a widely used tool most users seem to like and praise.

[burningion]

Have been building a generative video editor and doing interviews with enterprise creative cloud users. Basically there’s a large knowledge investment in their tools, and adobe (so far) has shown that their user’s knowledge investment won’t become useless because adobe will continue to incorporate the future into their existing knowledge stack. Adobe doesn’t have to be the best, but just show they won’t miss the boat entirely with this next generation of tools.

[andy99]

I don't know Adobe's business so could be wrong, but maybe "creatives" are not their key customers? If they're focusing on enterprise sales, they're selling to enterprise decision makers.

Every user hates using microsoft products, and don't get me started on SAP. But these are gigantic companies with wildly successful products aimed at enterprise customers.

[oldgradstudent]

> Every user hates using microsoft products

Only because they've never had a chance to experience the competition.

Having worked in IBM and had to use the Lotus Office Suite I can tell you Microsoft won fair and square. And I'm not even talking about the detestable abomination that is Lotus Notes.

[razodactyl]

This comment distracted me as I tried to recall a product I saw my mother using when I was younger. I fell asleep after I found it and never got back here until just now: Microsoft Works

This one was so obscure to find because it seems to exist in a weird space of being Microsoft Office but not.

[kamikaz1k]

If they’re selling to enterprise decision makers, aren’t they also B2B? In which case they have the same deficiency they started OpenAI has.

[kranke155]

I work with Adobe products everyday. They are mostly trash, at least in the video arena. People use them but they are painful to use. Premiere is known for poor stability, After Effects has just started being updated again after maybe 10+ years of nothing useful being added. Some parts of After Effects are clearly bolted on, and incompatible with each other.

They’re terrible products for the most part. But they buy the competition (Substance) or they develop some half baked substitute (Adobe XD) that people might use since it comes with the subscription.

[achow]

Sure there maybe scope of improvement in the products, but the point is they have $Billions in sale (year on year) to those customers (Ad agencies, movie studios etc.).

[bamboozled]

People love illustrator

[whywhywhywhy]

It was good in the 00s but now it’s rickety and antiquated and the GPU acceleration was never implemented correctly.

Figma could build an illustrator killer in 6 months if they wanted to and it would be obliterated.

If they actually tackled this task people would be kicking themselves for putting up with the shambles that is illustrator for this long.

[ska]

> Figma could build an illustrator killer in 6 months if they wanted to and it would be obliterated

Statements like this are almost always wrong, if for no other reason that a technically superior alternative is rarely compelling enough by itself. It that weren’t the case you would see it happen far more often…

[andy_ppp]

Well that wasn’t true when Figma just completely replaced Sketch. The sharing features and realtime multiuser interface is worth a lot to people.

[andy_ppp]

People also hate illustrator

[nerdbert]

Only because Adobe forced them to by murdering Freehand in front of their eyes.

[Zetobal]

People don't want to buy a third of an inch drill, they want a third of an inch hole.

[huytersd]

They tried to ponder to the open source CEO’s but as much as open source is an ideal, it’s a pretty sure way to failure for the most part. The only way open source works is if a rich company open sources parts of their non revenue forming items.

[jacky2wong]

Yes - open source is a good go to market strategy. They should not open source if there's no good, strong business strategy around how they plan to commercialize. But there are many ways to commercialize an open source model. For many it's lead generation into a paid offering or a managed offering of the open source model.