[AI] The AI Founder Taking Credit For Stable Diffusion’s Success Has A History Of Exaggeration

HowToBe

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This article rings true to me, not sure if it's a hit piece, but it seems to present a lot of information that could be verifiable to some degree.
The AI Founder Taking Credit For Stable Diffusion’s Success Has A History Of Exaggeration

Article opening:
Emad Mostaque is the modern-day Renaissance man who kicked off the AI gold rush. The Oxford master’s degree holder is an award-winning hedge fund manager, a trusted confidant to the United Nations and the tech founder behind Stable Diffusion — the text-to-image generator that broke the internet last summer and, in his words, pressured OpenAI to launch ChatGPT, the bot that mainstreamed AI. Now he’s one of the faces of the generative AI wave and has secured more than $100 million to pursue his vision of building a truly open AI that he dreams will transform Hollywood, democratize education and vanquish PowerPoint. “Hopefully they’ll give me a Nobel Peace Prize for that,” he joked in a January interview with Forbes.

At least, that’s the way that he tells the story.

In reality, Mostaque has a bachelor’s degree, not a master’s degree from Oxford. The hedge fund’s banner year was followed by one so poor that it shut down months later. The U.N. hasn’t worked with him for years. And while Stable Diffusion was the main reason for his own startup Stability AI’s ascent to prominence, its source code was written by a different group of researchers. “Stability, as far as I know, did not even know about this thing when we created it,” Björn Ommer, the professor who led the research, told Forbes. “They jumped on this wagon only later on.”
Acknowledging that the this is more of general comment than specific to the article, this is the frame of thought I'm suggesting this one from:
IMHO the tech's "danger" is not so much in an inherent "badness" as it is in who controls and develops it - and tries to prevent anyone else from developing it differently or shining reasonable light and caution on the phenomenon.

These generative AI techs are in part an encrypted "image" or reflection of all the human productions they are trained on (and of the minds that created those), and a magnifier, probably in some sense the way that the printing press was a magnifier, and rapid transport, and communication.

GPT and Latent Diffusion (the original name for the underlying image gen tech from the original researchers) are therefore of great interest to any who wish to choose the course of the rest of humanity in their stead. Some of this is "innocent" -- some of those working on OpenIA-style "safety" may unwisely think; "Well, I can help use this and my position to help save humanity from itself," while somehow not realizing maybe that means they should be using every resource available to them to make sure they don't accidentally use the tech to magnify and project their own potentially catastrophic illusions... and for the other part, well, we know there's no way any control system would keep their hands off this.

Meanwhile, there's a whole set of people trying to prevent this tech from monopolizing into a legal "Only those in the high towers can decide who may provide AI and who may use it" -- for instance by leveraging the 100% understandable shock and fear of a certain percentage of people, including those most directly and immediately affected including visual artists, writers, and educators.

Remember how much some intellectuals - some innocently, some belligerently, some insightfully, I would assume - criticized the emergence of the printing press as the "death of knowledge". But then, how today would we have our copies of the Bible and I Ching and Amazing Grace (or take your pick)? And cameras the "death of painting", or the internet the "death of books"... not to say these weren't/aren't possible futures.

Then again, the C's said AI would "overwhelm us". It's important not to assume for certain we know what that means (though I will say I will have to get myself up to speed on what may have been said since I was last active), but that's certainly a nod towards caution. But they didn't say it doomed us. It's important not to get tied up with assumptions.
 

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