👾 Stability A.I. and AWS

Is Generative A.I. a Cloud Sponsored game?

Hey Guys,

It’s important that we talk about how Generative A.I. will be funded. Namely how Generative A.I. matures in the Cloud.

On October 17th, 2022 Stability A.I. somehow managed to raised $101 million in a funding round led by Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC. The tranche values the company at $1 billion post-money, according to a Bloomberg source, and comes as the demand for AI-powered content generation accelerates.

Now it seems to be partnering with Amazon and AWS.

Microsoft may have long had OpenAI as its trusty partner (after its sizable investment), but AWS today announced that Stability AI, one of the hottest new upstarts in the generative AI space and the company behind Stable Diffusion, is doubling down on its cloud, making it its “preferred cloud provider to build and scale its AI models for image, language, audio, video, and 3D content generation.” This is super interesting, even as OpenAI needs more funding from Microsoft, these A.I. Generative startup are getting into massive partnerships with Cloud Sponsors.

In an era where BigTech corporations are like nations in how powerful they are, this is a worrisome sign for the much hyped trend of Generative A.I. Even as Google has DeepMind, now Microsoft has OpenAI, does that mean Amazon has Stability.AI? It’s not entirely clear.

The PR is all like you might expect: In addition, Stability AI will also work with AWS to make its open source tools and model available to more students, researchers, startups and enterprises (which sounds quite a bit like what Microsoft and OpenAI said when they announced their partnership). All of them want to appear like A.I. for good leaders, full of accessibility, open-source and the like.

According to TechCrunch, London- and San Francisco–based Stability AI is the brainchild of CEO Emad Mostaque. Having graduated from Oxford with a master’s in mathematics and computer science, he served as an analyst at various hedge funds before shifting gears to more public-facing works. Mostaque co-founded and bootstrapped Stability AI in 2020, motivated both by a personal fascination with AI and what he characterized as a lack of “organization” within the open source AI community.

Stable Diffusion enables anyone to generate creative images simply by inputting a text prompt describing the desired image. Building a generative AI model like Stable Diffusion requires a significant amount of computing power both for training and for inference. Thus it’s normal that they have to pick sides when it comes to the Cloud.

Stability AI offers generative AI models that create text, images, audio, video, code, and more from simple text instructions. Generative AI or foundational models—models that are adaptable to a variety of tasks in domains such as language, image, audio, and video—require a high-performance compute cluster with thousands of GPUs or AWS Trainium chips, advanced expertise, and months of training.

Will BigTech Steal Generative A.I.?

But will these foundational models in the end just be owned by BigTech and their Cloud hubs?

Competing startups may just be fighting to be acquired and by whom, such is the Venture Capital game they play. In some sense they are just building the AI-as-a-Service of the next era run from the Cloud.

Stability AI will use Amazon SageMaker to build and train machine learning models, reducing training time and costs by 58% compared to self-managed machine learning infrastructure. The company is provisioning one of the largest clusters of machine learning instances to run its open-source models on AWS using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), making it easier for developers to access those models.

The London-based firm, Stability A.I. will use all of this funding to accelerate the development of open AI models for language, image, audio, 3D, video, and for consumer and global enterprise use-cases. This could be lucrative stuff for AWS as well, over time.

The A.I. for good mission statements sound like propaganda at this point, we’ve heard it all before: Stability AI founder and CEO Emad Mostaque said, “AI promises to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges.” Tell that to Amazon Alexa, that is in the process of being dismantled.

The truth is Generative A.I. startups need sponsors with VERY DEEP pockets. Think about it, Stability AI has a cluster of more than 4,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs running in AWS, which it uses to train AI systems, including Stable Diffusion. It’s quite costly to maintain — Business Insider reports that Stability AI’s operations and cloud expenditures exceeded $50 million. But Mostaque has repeatedly asserted that the company’s R&D will enable it to train models more efficiently going forward.