In our world, AI has become not merely a new buzzword but a potent reality that has the potential to create a future that we couldn’t even conceive two decades ago. Many companies are scripting or trying to script success stories with AI.
It is amazing to realise that AI not only has the power to significantly improve our lives and lifestyle but also to endow the latent creativity in our minds with aesthetic efficiency. It enables us to come up with the images conceived in our minds even if we do not have drawing skills. It helps us to write efficiently, if not beautifully, even if our writing skills are inadequate.
In this increasingly AI-focused work environment, one start-up we need to notice is a British company named Stability AI, based in London. It projects itself as the world’s leading open-source generative AI company. It deserves a mention that in open-source software, the source code is available to everyone in the public domain to use, alter, and disseminate.
According to Crunchbase, Stability AI is an artificial intelligence-driven visual art startup that designs and implements open AI tools. The company specializes in creating and implementing solutions through the use of augmented technology and collaborative intelligence.
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AI for People
They provide innovative, open-access AI models in imaging, language, code, and audio, requiring minimal resources. Over the years, they have acquired a community of more than 300,000 creators, developers, and researchers worldwide.
The professed goal of Stability AI is to make AI a tool for and by the people, eventually laying the foundation for unleashing humanity’s full potential. Stability AI is engaged in building open AI tools and designing and implementing solutions using collective intelligence and augmented technology.
Founded in 2019, they acquired 10 million global users in just two months after its release, and till now, 400 million images are being generated using Stability AI’s UPI.
Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is their renowned innovation. It comprises a series of open-source text-to-image generation models based on diffusion techniques. Through these models, users can construct images with natural language prompts.
Since the original version became available in late 2022, Stability AI has introduced several new iterations of Stable Diffusion. The latest edition, Stable Diffusion 3, was introduced in February 2023. It offers better-quality images than the earlier versions, and the new edition is better equipped to understand complex prompts.
Stable Diffusion 3 Medium is the latest and most advanced text-to-image AI model in their Stable Diffusion 3 series, comprising two billion parameters. It specializes in photorealism, handles intricate prompts, and produces clear text.
Innovative Applications
They have also developed Stable Assistant, a friendly chatbot equipped with their latest text and image generation technology, featuring Stable Diffusion 3, Stable Video, Stable Image Services, and Stable LM 2 12B. Stable Assistant is powered by Ultra, Stability AI’s most powerful and flexible image generation tool, leveraging the state-of-the-art model Stable Diffusion 3.
Whether you are writing a blog post or rummaging for the right words to caption an image, Stability AI’s advanced language model, Stable LM 2 12B, fuels Stable Assistant, empowering it to enrich your content with its advanced text generation abilities.
Another of Stability AI’s applications is Stable Artisan. It is a fun multimodal generative AI Discord bot that utilises the products on the Stability AI Platform API within the Discord ecosystem. The bot can be accessed on the Stable Diffusion Discord Server to generate and edit images together with the rest of the community of Stability AI.
With their Stable Audio, one can create music with the help of AI. This application can generate up to 3-minute high-quality audio that one can use commercially.
Funds in Need
According to a source, Stability AI generated 80 million USD funding in recent years from a group of investors that includes Coatue Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Prem Akkaraju, the former chief of Weta Digital, has been appointed as the new CEO of Stability AI and has also invested in the venture. Some months before, Stability AI’s Founder and former CEO, Emad Mostaque, exited from the company, compounding troubles for the AI start-up facing a cash shortage.
Dana Settle, the Co-founder of Greycroft, Colin Bryant, General Partner of Coatue Management and Akkaraju were also added to Stability AI’s board.
In 2022, Stability AI raised 101 million USD in a seed round led by Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners at a valuation of 1 billion USD, but since then, the creative company has been struggling to generate additional funds, perhaps due to its lack of a smart business model.
