StabilityAI chief resigns, raising doubts about AI start-up’s future

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The future of StabilityAI, once seen as among the world’s most promising artificial intelligence start-ups, has been thrown into doubt following the chaotic departure of its founder and concern it will struggle to become profitable.

Emad Mostaque resigned last week as chief executive of the London-based group behind Stable Diffusion, an AI model that can create images through simple written prompts, with its app being downloaded more than 150 million times.

The three-year-old company was valued at $1 billion in August 2022, following a $101 million funding round led by top US tech investors Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The deal put it in the vanguard of the generative AI revolution alongside groups such as OpenAI and Inflection.