Stability AI Appoints New CEO

British startup Stability AI has appointed Prem Akkaraju as its new CEO. The 51-year-old Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, "is part of a group of investors including former Facebook President Sean Parker that has stepped in to save Stability with a cash infusion that could result in a lower valuation for the firm," reports the Information (paywalled). "The new funding will likely shrink the stakes of some existing investors, who have collectively contributed more than $100 million."

In March, Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque stepped down from the role to pursue decentralized AI. "In a series of posts on X, Mostaque opined that one can't beat 'centralized AI' with more 'centralized AI,' referring to the ownership structure of top AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic," reported TechCrunch at the time. The move followed a report in April that claimed the company ran out of cash to pay its bills for its rented cloud GPUs. Last year, the company raised millions at a $1 billion valuation.

Bubble...

[Virtucon]

meet needle... POP!

Stability is floundering.

[Rei]

Emad had a good ethos but was a terrible manager. The company has burned through its cash on minor product lines that few people (or nobody) uses and threw out grants for using corporate resources left and right. Stable Diffusion 3 has a good architecture - able to do text pretty well, to understand relative positionings, good aesthetics, etc - but has some really serious flaws, often making humans more deformed than even ancient SD1.5. Many users deliberately bought Stability memberships to support th