Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, speaks at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, June 22, 2023.
David Paul Morris | David Paul Morris Bloomberg | Getty Images
Troubled AI startup Stability is laying off employees Controversial former CEO Emad Mostaque exits.
Stability, the company behind the popular Stable Diffusion large language model, laid off more than 20 employees in an effort to “right-size” the business after a period of unsustainable growth, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.
The company’s newly appointed co-CEOs Shanshan Huang and Christian Laforte told employees in an email Wednesday night that the company needed to “reorganize parts of the business, which will mean saying goodbye to some colleagues.”
“We have separately notified those affected and we will provide support to them during this period,” Huang and LaForte, who serve as the company’s chief operating officer and chief technology officer respectively, said in an internal memo.
According to public data on the Internet, Stability AI’s layoffs account for approximately 10% of its global workforce, and the company employs a total of approximately 200 employees.
A person familiar with the matter told CNBC that most of the employees affected by these measures are employees in business operations and have received layoff notices.
Last month, Stability announced that its former CEO Mostaque would leave the company to “pursue decentralized artificial intelligence” and be replaced by Wong and Laforte.
Mostak’s departure comes after media reports raised questions about his qualifications.
A June 2023 Forbes Report It said Mostak misled people, including his own investors, about his master’s degree from Oxford University and the nature of his work with Oxford University. Amazon Stability describes it as a strategic deal, but nothing more than a standard cloud computing lease.
Mostaq responded at the time that several of Forbes’ allegations were “false accusations and misrepresentations.” He said he did not receive an Oxford degree because he did not attend the graduation ceremony and instead arranged to receive his degree by post.
He also doubled down on the deal with Amazon and its cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services, describing it as a “strategic business alliance” in which AWS builds an “extremely rare, purpose-built computing cluster” that meets stability requirements.
Stability AI is still looking for a permanent CEO to fill its top leadership position.company explain It continues to operate normally and is still releasing new products, most recently releasing a developer API, or application programming interface, for its Stable Diffusion 3 AI model.
You can read the full memo from co-CEOs Wong and Christian Laforte below:
Dear team,
As you know, over the past few weeks, the leadership team has been hard at work developing a strategic plan to reduce our cost base, strengthen support for investors and partners, and enable our team to continue developing and launching innovative products. .
Following a review of our global teams, we have identified the need to restructure parts of the business, which will sadly mean saying goodbye to some colleagues. Those affected by this have been notified individually and we will be supporting them during this period.
These decisions are not taken lightly and are designed to right-size the business and centralize our operations, which is critical to setting us on a more sustainable path and putting us in the best position to continue developing our cutting technology . Products like Stable Diffusion 3 API enhance our deep technology leadership and demonstrate our unique systemic importance to the AI ecosystem.
We will hold our regular town hall meeting on Thursday as planned, and we encourage you to submit any questions to our leadership team on the form that will be sent out soon. In the meantime, please feel free to discuss any concerns with your manager.
We would like to thank everyone for their dedication and contributions. We recognize the challenges we face, but we have plans in place. Through the hard work and dedication of this team, we are improving every day and moving steadily in the right direction.
best wishes,
Shanshan and Christian
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