The company behind text-generating image AI model Stable Diffusion is cutting jobs to cope with financial woes

Stable Diffusion is one of the most well-known text-generating image artificial intelligence models in the industry. The operating company behind it is called Stability AI. There have been reports earlier that it is in financial trouble and cannot even pay cloud computing-related bills.

The financial dilemma is very dire for artificial intelligence research companies, because the model training process requires a lot of GPU computing power. Companies like Stability AI that rely on cloud computing platforms to provide GPU computing power need to pay a lot of fees.

Earlier, Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque had voluntarily resigned, and the newly appointed co-CEOs Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte had issued an internal open letter announcing layoffs.

Although the issue of financial distress was not mentioned in the internal open letter, the two co-CEOs jointly decided that Stability AI must reorganize part of the business to adjust the scale of the business.

The layoff ratio of Stability AI is 10%. The company has about 200 employees around the world, that is, 20 employees are leaving. These employees are mainly responsible for operations, and Stability AI promises to provide compensation.

Whether layoffs and business reorganization can help Stable AI survive the crisis is still unknown. It is worth noting that Stable Diffusion is open source. If the company cannot survive the crisis or is acquired, then whether Stable Diffusion will continue to be open source is also a question.

If it cannot be open sourced, it may be a huge loss for the industry. After all, many Vincentian graph models have learned from Stable Diffusion.