😺 Stability or Instability?

PLUS: How to create an AI avatar of yourself!

Welcome, humans.

ChatGPT celebrated its one-year anniversary today, making it the 2nd smartest baby in history, trailing only Stewie Griffin from Family Guy. Hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of millions in revenue in 365 days—truly remarkable!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Stability AI is talking to potential acquirers.
HeyGen lets you create an AI avatar of yourself…
Amazon launched its own AI image generator.
Google researchers coaxed some training data out of ChatGPT.

Stability AI is an amazing startup but not so amazing business.

never good when a founder is labeled “internet personality”

Yin vs. yang. Accelerationists vs. doomers. A visionary startup founder vs. ROI-driven VCs.

Meet Emad Mostaque.

He’s the controversial CEO of Stability AI, a hot startup that has seen more ups and downs than a Real Housewives reunion episode.

The good news is: Stability AI is shipping incredible AI products.

They’ve got their flagship image generator SDXL 1.0, which IMHO takes 3rd place behind Midjourney and DALL-E 3, plus:

Stable Audio: create music from text prompts.
SDXL Turbo (NEW): instantaneous image generation (<1 second).
Stable Video (NEW): turns images into short videos (like this Guy Looking Back meme!).
Plus 10+ nifty editing tools like swapping items, upscaling, replacing backgrounds, and more (all FREE on Clipdop).

The incredible thing about Stability is that it open-sources its image model, meaning anyone can build products on top of it (unlike Midjourney/OpenAI).

The bad news is: when you’re making free stuff, it’s really hard to make money.

This is why Stability failed to raise money at a $4B valuation (!) earlier this year—it ended up settling for $25M and $50M convertibles notes in June and November.

To make matters worse, CEO Mostaque is wanted gone by investors after prompting a staff exodus and being exposed as a rampant liar via Forbes’ brutal exposé.

Now, there were whispers that Stability might try to get acquired.

TBD…

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This startup lets anyone create an AI avatar of themselves.

Go watch this video, but don't read the caption.

Seriously go watch it, we’ll wait…

~30 seconds later~

So, that video you just saw? Looks and sounds like a real person, right? Not quite.

It’s an AI avatar of Sarah Guo made by HeyGen, a startup that can (now) transform a smartphone recording of you into an eerily accurate avatar that mimics your voice, and it does this in a mere five minutes.

It’s so good that HeyGen’s revenue has more than doubled since we first covered them in September and they just bagged $5.6M in fresh funding.

Imagine the possibilities—a digital you (or choose from 100 pre-made avatars) that can say anything from a single recording. Think advertising, sales, explainer videos...

Check out HeyGen and let us know what you think!

Around the Horn.

Amazon launched its own AI image tool called Titan Image Generator.
Sam Altman is officially returning to OpenAI as CEO—here’s his message to the company.
After being caught off guard by the board conflict, Microsoft is getting a non-voting board seat.
Perplexity announced two LLMs connected to the internet that outperform GPT-3.5 and are accessible via an API.
A few Google researchers were able to get ChatGPT to hand over some of its training data.