Emad Mostaquethe CEO and founder of the open source platform Stability AI, hinted at plans to go public in the coming years, at the Cerebral Valley AI conference in San Francisco on Thursday. He also dismissed the idea that Stability AI, an OpenAI rival and leader in generative artificial intelligence, will one day be acquired.
“I don’t think you can just go public,” Mostaque said during an interview with a journalist Eric newcomer. “You have to have great revenue, great margins, distribution, and so we’re executing … we’re 17 months old.” He also said that the business model of Stability AI’s open source platform will be better seen in the coming year,” but added that he “doesn’t want to give away my arbitrage capabilities.”
The generative intelligence company came into limelight after building Stable Diffusion, an image-generating system, along with Dance Diffusion and developing open source music. So it’s not surprising that Mostaque is championing the creation of open source standards in the world of generated art.
Mostaque was one of the notable 1,100+ signatories to publish an open letter this week asking for more regulation in the AI space, but more specifically to “immediately pause all AI labs for at least 6 months.” His name appeared alongside Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Tristan Harris.
“OpenAI must be transparently and likely to be governed; what is the governance of Open AI? Nobody knows. What is Transparent? Completely opaque,” Mostaque said at the panel defending the petition, which some critics see destructive or an attempt by some builders to curb competition.
The bullishness around exits, and pauses on innovation, is coming as That reports Bloomberg swirl that Stability AI is seeking funding that would value the company at $4 billion, up from a reported $1 billion post-money valuation it secured in October when it raised capital from Coatue and Lightspeed Venture partners. Mostaque did not comment on fundraising rumors. Earlier this month, Stability AI bought image editing tool Init ML.
Despite all the space activity, Mostaque doesn’t think AI is a bubble, saying “this is bigger than 5G and self-driving customers.”
“When founders come to me, I say, build good products and solve problems… most things are still superficial,” he said.
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