Emad Mostaque

Founder & CEO, Intelligent Internet · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutiveauthor@emostaque ↗LinkedIn ↗ii.inc ↗Wikipedia ↗

Mostaque is best known as the co-founder and former CEO of Stability AI, which funded and popularized the open-source text-to-image model Stable Diffusion. After stepping down from Stability AI in March 2024 to pursue decentralized AI, he founded Intelligent Internet and authored the book The Last Economy.

24statements → 12claims → 4claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 3.83/5average certainty → 2.75/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

3 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 7 not checkable as stated how the 12 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

7 predictions · 5 assertions · 5 opinions · 1 insight · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 12 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Emad argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
ChatGPT-Level AI Models Will Run Locally on Smartphones by 2028
“You will see ChatGPT level models running on the edge on smartphones in five years, which will be crazy.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 44:38 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Stability AI Repositories Beat Ethereum and Bitcoin Combined in GitHub Stars
“You know, on GitHub stars, we've overtaken Ethereum and Bitcoin cumulatively. It took them 10 years. We got there in like three, four months.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 7:10 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Emad Mostaque on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Emad Mostaque said on No Priors that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Stability AI Has More Compute Available Than Microsoft or Google
“The reality is we have more compute available to us than Microsoft or Google.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 9:33 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2028
All Base Foundation Models Will Ultimately Open Source Their Pre-Training Phase
“So my take is that foundation models will all be open source for the deep learning phase.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 10:19 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Emerging Market AI Systems Will Outperform the West Within Five Years
“I am certain that system will outperform anything in the West within five years.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 19:11 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Opinion
Only About 100 People Worldwide Possess Skills to Train Foundation Models
“There's only like a hundred people who can train models in the world. Like it's not really a science. It's more an art, like losses explode all over the place when you try to do something.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 31:58 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Opinion
Large AI Model Runs Should Be Registered Like Dual-Use Biological Weapons
“I think that a productive outcome of that regulation is anything above a certain level of flops needs to be registered similar to, well, bio weapons and things that have the potential for dual use.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 38:59 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Small Hive Architecture AI Models Will Massively Outperform Large Monolithic Models
“I think that small models will outperform large models massively, like I said, the Hive model aspect”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 44:38 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Opinion
Democratizing AI Is a Moral Imperative as Models Reach Superhuman Level
“More on that, a bit of a moral imperative to make this technology available to everyone because we're now going to very narrow superhuman performance and everyone should have access to that.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 1:59 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Opinion
OpenAI Is Incorrect That Image Generation Is Not Core to AGI
“I do believe that they are incorrect around multimodality being, or images being a core component of that.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 26:26 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Insight
Large Language Models Are Creative Fiction Engines Rather Than Factual Databases
“I do say these large models as well should be viewed as fiction, creative models, not fact models, because otherwise we've created the most efficient compression in the world. Does it make sense you can take terabytes of data and compress it down to a few giga…”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 36:14 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Governments Will Eventually Pour Hundreds of Billions Into AGI Model Scaling
“When governments decide, and I don't believe they've decided yet, that having an AGI is the number one thing, tens of billions, hundreds of billions will go into building bigger models.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 39:38 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Malicious Actors Already Possess Advanced AI Models and Thousands of A100 GPUs
“I think the bad guys, I'm going to put that in quotes have access to these models already and thousands and thousands of A-one hundreds.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 42:51 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Prediction Held up
ChatGPT-Level AI Models Will Run Locally on Smartphones by 2028
“You will see ChatGPT level models running on the edge on smartphones in five years, which will be crazy.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 44:38 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Disclosure
Stability AI Is Deploying Four Million Tablets to Children Across Malawi
“So right now we're deploying four million tablets to every child in Malawi.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 18:42 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Movie Studios Are Already Saving Millions by Implementing Stable Diffusion Locally
“We are working with multiple movie studios at the moment who are saving millions of dollars, just implementing stable diffusion by itself, let alone these other technologies.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 25:23 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Prediction Held up
Generative Image Models Will Soon Achieve 25 Frames Per Second
“With the additional breakthroughs that are coming through, it'll be 25 frame images a second. That's a hundred times speed up over a hundred times just from getting it out there and people interested in doing that.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 30:08 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Disclosure
Stability AI Is Exclusively Training Video Models on the Eros Bollywood Catalog
“So like now we're training on hundreds and soon thousands of Bollywood movies to create Bollywood video models with our partnership with Eros you know, and that is exclusively licensed.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 31:25 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Opinion
Multi-Model Interactions Will Dominate the Future of AI Over Zero-Shot Models
“And again, I think this is the future, not just zero shot, multiple models interacting with each other is the way full stop.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 35:08 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Disclosure
Emad Mostaque Personally Funded Early Open-Source AI and Midjourney Grants
“So I started supporting the whole space at Luther and beyond, giving jobs to the developers, compute for the model creators, funding the various notebooks from disco diffusion to these other things, you know, giving grants to people like mid journey that were …”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 4:15 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Assertion Contradicted
Stability AI Repositories Beat Ethereum and Bitcoin Combined in GitHub Stars
“You know, on GitHub stars, we've overtaken Ethereum and Bitcoin cumulatively. It took them 10 years. We got there in like three, four months.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 7:10 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Disclosure
Stability AI Secured a Seven Million Hour Grant on Summit Supercomputer
“So to give you an example, we just got a seven million hour grant on Summit, one of the fastest supercomputers in the US.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 9:43 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Assertion Supported
Distilled Stable Diffusion Models Can Run Locally on iPhones in Seconds
“Now, as of the release of Distilled Stable Diffusion, it will run in a couple of seconds on an iPhone, and we have neural engine access, because our view of the future is creating models that aren't necessarily bigger, but that are customizable and editable.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 12:37 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Computational Biology Will See Artificial Intelligence's Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs
“And then I think on a breakthrough side, computational biology will be the biggest one.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 14:36 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Disclosure
Stability AI Plans to Release an Open Medical Foundation Model
“We will release an open MedPalm model. Well, med stable GPT.”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 14:53 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque
Disclosure
Stability AI Was Originally Conceived as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization
“And originally I thought you got communities, you gotta make them kind of coordinated. Could a DAO work or a DAO of DAOs? And that's how stability started. After about a week, I realized that was not gonna work and it was incredibly difficult. So then I figure…”
Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 ▶ 4:44 No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque May 3, 2023 31m
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