The Man OpenAI Fears The Most

Key Takeaways

this is the man open AI tears the most his name is emat mostak and he is the CEO of stability AI one of the fastest growing companies in the world by making everything open source he is directly going against companies like Google meta and open AI but Emma doesn't care he is here to win Ahmad is The Man Behind stable diffusion the image generating AI my name is David Andre and this is the fascinating story of Ahmad mustaf emat was born in April of 1983 which makes him 40 years old a little older than Sam Altman his full name is Muhammad Ahmad mustak because he was born in Jordan but just a month later after he was born he was taken to Bangladesh where he lived until he was seven that year his life completely changed because his family decided to move to the UK where Amat was raised and educated and Ahmad didn't take this opportunity for granted he studied hard and somehow managed to get his way into Oxford which is one of the most prestigious schools in the world he graduated from Oxford with degrees in mathematics and computer science which is the Perfect combo for AI in his 20s Amat became interested in helping the Islamic World by creating online forums for Muslim communities and developing Islamic AI little did he know that just a few years later he would completely revolutionize the entire AI industry but emmat didn't start out as an AI researcher in fact his first success was as a hedge fund manager which is about as far from AI as you can get he spent 13 years working across various hedge funds in the UK which got his net worth up to 7 and eventually eight figures but Emma didn't feel that being a hedge fund manager was impacting the world enough he wanted to have a much bigger impact the money was great when working with hedge funds and he was even appearing on the TV a lot of the time but he wasn't satisfied and the job started to become repetitive one time he even said I spent most of my career making rich people richer and if that isn't the definition of hedge funds then I don't know what is what's interesting is that emmat actually stumbled just the AI Community by accident when his son was born he was diagnosed with autism and when Ahmad went to the doctors they didn't give him anything they said it can't be cured it can't be improved nothing can be done but emmat doesn't take no as an answer and so Emma took the money he made from hedge funds and assembled a team of AI scientists and researchers and together they Dove deep into the field of AI they used techniques like deep learning and neural networks to figure out what autism is how it works and can it be improved the research concluded that certain chemicals and hormones in the brain were causing and making autism worse now emat was able to solve that encounter that which actually helped his son learn faster that enabled him to go to a mainstream school which doesn't sound that impressive but for a child with autism that's like winning the Nobel Prize one of Emma's biggest passions is philanthropy you know helping people especially those who didn't have the best start in life in 2019 he founded symmetry a startup that aimed to reduce the cost of Technology for individuals living in poverty like people in Africa Indonesia India and Bangladesh however Ahmad only worked on the startup for one year because it was tough making it commercially viable however Ahmad saw the potential that the AI field had and he wanted to go as big as possible and so he founded stability.ai stability was first founded in late 2019 but Ahmad only Incorporated the company in 2021 the reason why he chose the name stability is because the AI industry is very volatile very uncertain you know it's growing super rapidly which can be intimidating and even off-putting to some people people like institutional investors and for that reason making the name stability you know something that's stable that has solid foundations makes it seem more long-term and more safe six months ago stability.ai had 103 employees but on his most recent podcast emot said that currently they have over 170 meaning the company is growing very fast the motto of stability is AI by the people for the people and is it just me or is the slogan being used everywhere stability.ai does a lot of things but of course its biggest hit is stable diffusion the state-of-the-art image generating AI which can create awesome masterpieces like these [Music] a very important fact about stable diffusion is that it's completely open source meaning anyone can check the code and the data it was trained on which is completely different approach from companies like mid-journey and openai who are much more secretive and close about their software and AI so why does emmat believe in open source so much because this is the infrastructure of the future does it make sense that the most powerful technology in the world is controlled by a few with no accountability No it should be owned and controlled by everyone and if you don't think that AI will be the most important technology of all time just look at the amount of machine learning and AI papers now if you keep up anyone hears ml practitioner can keep up with a literally exponential curve in AI research if so you hired please you know come join me after this right now to build a very successful AI research lab you need access to a super computer I think Greg Brockman the CPO of openai said it the best he said I think the most benefits of AI will go to whoever has the biggest computer and for that reason Ahmad mustak and stability.ai partnered with Amazon you need to have some amazing things so I see some of my buddies at AWS here they kindly build us one of the fastest computers in the world when starting stability Amat completely bootstrapped the company meaning he used his own money to pay for employee salaries the AI research and just all the expenses but despite being a successful hedge fund manager emad doesn't have endless money and so in October of 2022 stability AI raised 101 million dollars in around led by light speed Venture partners and code management this round of funding put stabilities valuation at over 1 billion dollars which is crazy for a company that was barely a year old at that point however Ahmad wants to go bigger much bigger this year in 2023 he is asking for a 4 billion dollar valuation which would make stability by far the biggest open source company in the AI field for most people 4 billion dollars would be more than enough but isn't most people he wants to go even bigger his plan is to take stability public and have the biggest IPO in the history of the field and the reasons for that aren't just Financial he wants to make sure that the everyday person like you and me has the opportunity to invest into the AI field because right now you can't really invest into AI companies most of them are closed Source or too small you know the best you can currently do is buy something like Nvidia stock but MRT wants to change that he wants to take stability public that way even the retail investors can have a piece of the pie but what even is stabilities business model I mean the company is open source meaning you can download stable diffusion for free so how do they make money well to my surprise the business model is actually quite genius Amat plans on creating custom AI models for private companies like Banks hedge funds or insurance companies basically companies that can't use chair GPD or models that are closed source and the reason for that is because openai and Google you know they are using every single message in chegebt and Bart to train the future models and when you have large amounts of proprietary data like for example big banks have you can't just put that into other companies model and trust them to do good stuff with it you know that's a massive security confidential risk so there needs to be some company which in this case is stability.ai that's able to come to these Banks come to these massive companies that need their own custom models and actually do it for them because you know it's not the same as building a website you know you could hire one or two HTML developers maybe one CSS guy and that's more than enough but to build your own language model that's actually good you need hundreds if not thousands of AI researchers that's where emmat plans to capitalize currently stability charges one million dollar minimum for companies to get their own model made by them which isn't a bad check to get in your bank stability might be one of the fastest growing companies in the world but working there is definitely not easy at the end of 2022 and Ahmad gave his entire team two weeks off and told them to prepare because 2023 is going to be crazy and we're not even halfway through the year and the amount of progress like gpt4 llama vicunia open Assistant Auto GPT Bart like the amount of progress in 2023 has been insane so the second half is going to be even crazier now Emma is obviously a super smart guy and as a result his interviews are packed with knowledge I mean the amount of stuff I learned about AI just by watching Ahmad mustak podcasts is like mind-blowing and if for some reason you're watching this Mr please hit me up I would love to do an interview with you now what's interesting is that despite being a CEO of an AI company in March of 2023 emad signed a letter calling for all AI labs to immediately post development for at least 6 months especially on models more powerful than gpd4 you know the type of models that are being used to eventually create AGI Ahmad mustak doesn't give a damn about AGI about AGI yeah sorry for some people here do what I care about is AI that helps people but AGI isn't the only thing that Emma doesn't care about citations and state-of-the-art are another two things that he doesn't give a damn about I don't give a damn about citations or state-of-the-art all I care about is the quality of your output we don't care if you get things wrong it's not constrained because you are creatives and artists building this technology one of the main reasons why emmat was drawn to make an image generating AI like stable diffusion is because he has a rare condition called aphantasia which means that he doesn't have the ability to visualize anything in his brain which sounds absolutely crazy if you ask me I mean I can't even imagine not having the ability to visualize stuff in my head I have a Fantasia so I can't visualize anything in my brain which is more common than people would think in fact a lot of the developers in this space have that like we've got nothing in our brain if you want me to make more videos like this then please subscribe it takes 1.4 seconds