We open-sourced Stable Diffusion and gave it away for free. OpenAI charged for DALL-E. We gave it to the world. That decision made us famous. It also made it very hard to build a business.
I raised $100 million and told investors we'd be the open-source AI company. The Linux of AI. That pitch worked beautifully in fundraising. It worked less beautifully in revenue.
Stable Diffusion was downloaded 10 million times in two weeks. Ten million. It powered thousands of apps. And we captured almost none of that value. Turns out giving away your core product makes monetization tricky.
I resigned as CEO. The board and I disagreed on the path forward. I believed in open source. They believed in revenue. Both are valid. They just point in different directions.
Getty Images sued us for using their photos to train Stable Diffusion without permission. Artists were furious. I understand why. But AI training on public data is how every model works. We just got caught in the crossfire first.
I wanted to democratize AI. I genuinely believe open-source AI is better for humanity than AI controlled by three companies. Whether Stability AI survives or not, the models are out there. The genie doesn't go back in the bottle.