Emad Mostaque Fireside Chat (hosted by Elad Gil)

Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque in a fireside chat hosted by Elad Gil.

Why it was kept

Kyle’s notes: the cost of training the Stability model; frustration at lack of access to cutting-edge models; latent diffusion becoming stable diffusion; research shifting out of academia; early revenue and user numbers; open source lagging closed source; and a paper on EU liability for model creators. [STALE] — the YouTube video is no longer available (checked 2026-09-29); the title comes from Kyle’s captured link.

As Kyle captured it

• Fireside Chat: Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI - Hosted by Elad Gil
  • Emad tweeted that it costs $150K to train the Stability model
  • Frustration around not having access to cutting edge models; GPT Neo and GPT J, which have been downloaded 25M times.
  • Latent diffusion morphed into stable diffusion
  • 80% of all AI research is around foundation models
  • 0% of discoveries are in academia, vs. 60% a few years ago. And that’s, in part, because open source allowed many more people to work on these things.
  • Organize everything around stable diffusion, but that was really hard
  • 100K GB of images and compressed it down to a 2 GB file
  • Fusion of language model with an image model was the breakthrough for things like DALL E 2
  • Using stable diffusion in their own companies
  • Made millions in revenue in their first month, profitable in the next few months
  • 1.8M users, and stable diffusion more broadly has 15-20M users
  • Open source will always lag closed source. The amount of money going into generative media will dwarf the $100B that went into self-driving cars. Every company should have their own benchmark models
  • Brooklyn had a paper on the EU trying to make liability for how models are used the responsibility of the creator of the model