A massive shakeup at Stability AI: the CEO Emad Mostaque is quitting the company and stepping down from its board of directors. The company is responsible for the text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, first released in 2022 with its code open source. Mostaque was instrumental to the launch and promotion of Stable Diffusion.
COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte will serve as interim Co-CEOs, the company announced.
Mostaque’s departure comes after Forbes reported that 3 of 5 key engineers who developed the diffusion model left the company. Mostaque tweeted that he didn’t like the centralization of AI and plans on pursuing “deceentralized AI.”
Stability AI is currently being sued in two copyright lawsuits, one by Getty Images and the other a proposed class-action brought by the artist Sarah Andersen. It will be interesting to watch if the internal shakeup at the company affects the defense of the company in the lawsuits.