At least two high-profile people have left the artificial intelligence company in recent weeks.
(Bloomberg) — Stability AI, the closely watched artificial intelligence startup, has lost at least two top executives in recent weeks, including its head of research and chief operating officer.
David Ha, head of research for the London-based startup, resigned this month. Chief Operating Officer Ren Ito was “let go,” according to Chief Executive Officer Emad Mostaque. Ito didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ito’s departure is part of a broader shake-up at the company, Mostaque said. It’s a shuffle that comes not long after a high-profile news report criticizing stability. “We are reconstituting leadership as we scale,” Mostaque said in a message late London time. He also said Stability was hiring, growing its ranks “to 185 and more.” In a series of tweets Monday, Mostaque pointed to new hires at the company and cited the “need to scale right.”
In an emailed statement, Stability AI spokesman Motez Bishara wrote, “We can confirm that David Ha has taken a break from employment at Stability AI for personal reasons.” He also said, “Ren Ito has left to pursue other interests. We wish them both well and thank them for their contributions to Stability AI.” Ha declined to comment.
The departures come the same month that an article in Forbes said Mostaque had a “history of exaggeration.” Mostaque denied the allegations in a lengthy blog post. He also responded to the report at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on June 22. “I have Asperger’s and ADHD, and I have a very definitive view of the future,” he said on stage. “I think that shocks people because they can’t deal with the exponentials.”
Last valued by investors at $1 billion, Stability AI is known for popularizing Stable Diffusion, an open-source image generator it released publicly in August 2022. The startup didn’t create the product, but Stability AI supported its development and has said that most of its original researchers now work for the company. Stable Diffusion emerged as a key rival to OpenAI’s Dall-E, and Stability AI has since trained and released numerous versions of the tool.
Before joining Stability AI, research chief Ha worked at Alphabet Inc.’s Google Brain division, where he was a research scientist focused on generative artificial intelligence, technology that can generate content such as text or images. Ha joined Stability AI in October, where he was involved in recruiting and led the company’s research efforts.
Ha and Ito are not the only high-profile people to leave the startup this year after a relatively short tenure. In an interview with Bloomberg in May, Christian Cantrell said he left Stability at the end of March to start his own company. Cantrell had joined the company as vice president of product in October after working at Adobe for 20 years. He was responsible for offerings such as Stability AI’s application programming interfaces and its DreamStudio software. DreamStudio can be used to produce and edit images via the Stable Diffusion image generator.
–With assistance from Mark Bergen.
(Updates with CEO comment starting in the second paragraph.)
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