Today, Lightspeed is excited to announce our investment in the $101M financing of Stability AI, a community-driven, open-source generative AI company. At the time of our investment in August 2022, Stability took the world by storm when it released Stable Diffusion, a state-of-the-art text-to-image model, to the world.
Our thesis for generative AI starts with the belief that storytelling, whether it be about a person, business, or idea, is fundamentally what makes us human. But telling a good story is not easy — it requires “content creation” whether it be text, images, video, audio, or a presentation. Today, the process of content creation remains manual and difficult.
Generating a beautiful image representing a story not only requires imagination, but artistic skill, knowledge of tools like Adobe Photoshop, and years of work and training. Generative AI has the power to reduce much of this “manual” work and make it more accessible to all. We believe generative AI has the power to fundamentally change almost every creative endeavor, whether it be entertainment, media, advertising, education, science, and art. Ultimately, Stability’s vision is to bring similar capabilities to text, video, audio, and more.
What makes Stable Diffusion unique from other text-to-image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney is that the code and model weights were released publicly, and the models can even run on most consumer hardware equipped with a modest GPU. The company also launched DreamStudio beta, a SaaS offering that provides a user interface and API for generating images at just 1c/image. In less than a month, the company amassed over 1.5 million users for Dreamstudio and has over 200,000 open-source developers using Stable Diffusion.
As active open-source investors, we’ve seen first-hand how combining “free” with a vibrant community can ignite massive creativity around technology. At the same time, Stable Diffusion is unlike any other open-source project we’ve come across. Its creation story is novel, having been done in collaboration with academics (LMU Munich), other companies (RunwayML), and independent AI communities (EleutherAI, LAION). We believe Stability AI will make the ideal business partner for companies, non-profits, and governments that do not have access to AI talent, compute resources, and the ability to customize usage.
We would be remiss in not acknowledging that Stable Diffusion has also generated controversy. Who has the rights to the images the programs learned from? How should deepfakes and hateful content be handled? Can the images that are AI-generated be considered true art? Stable Diffusion’s license, the CreativeML Open RAIL-M officially forbids many of these harmful uses, but with the code and model weights out in the public, enforcement can be difficult. At Lightspeed, we believe these ethical issues are incredibly important, but they are also inevitable with technological progress. It is better to discuss them out in the open vs. behind closed doors.
The founder of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, is a brilliant, one-of-a-kind thinker. He is mission-driven to the core and believes that only an independent company (and not the tech giants) can make this technology available to people everywhere. We’re excited for the road ahead, and all the new ideas and applications that will be born from Stable Diffusion. And we’re honored to be on the journey together.
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