Stability AI Raises $1 Billion and the Ire of Competitors

Principal Analyst, Advanced Analytics

Summary Bullets:

• The ability to generate an image by typing several textual instructions brings home the potential of AI and seems indistinguishable from magic.

• Stability AI was released in August 2022. Stability AI differentiates itself from competitors by not censoring the user’s creation.

Stability AI (SAI) was co-founded in 2020 by Emad Mostaque, who earned a master’s degree at Oxford University in mathematics and computer science. After a stint as an analyst at several different hedge funds, Mostaque decided to switch gears and pursue his interest in AI. Mostaque provided the initial funding but soon found the company awash in venture funding, giving SAI a valuation of approximately $1 billion. With SAI, artificial intelligence moves beyond analytics and becomes a creator. In order to create an image with SAI, a creator simply types descriptive text into the DreamStudio, and an image slowly appears.

Vertex Brings Simplicity to Computer Vision, but Computer Vision Still Needs Additional Technology

Principal Analyst, Advanced Analytics

Summary Bullets:

• Machine vision is critical to future-facing products such as self-driving vehicles and delivery robots. Developing a vision-enabled machine is difficult and expensive.

• Google’s Vertex AI Vision will allow companies to build machine vision applications that can be customized to perform a specialized task.

In the summer of 1966, summer students at MIT were tasked with creating a visual system. The story was certainly true, but time distorted the event. The “summer vision project” became an urban legend often told by computer vision scientists to demonstrate how the project participants, who thought they could come up with a prototype by the end of summer, underestimated the project’s complexity.