Emad Mostaque — Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, and What’s Next

Emad Mostaque — Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, and What’s Next

Author: Lukas Biewald November 15, 2022 Duration: 1:10:29

Emad Mostaque is CEO and co-founder of Stability AI, a startup and network of decentralized developer communities building open AI tools. Stability AI is the company behind Stable Diffusion, the well-known, open source, text-to-image generation model.

Emad shares the story and mission behind Stability AI (unlocking humanity's potential with open AI technology), and explains how Stability's role as a community catalyst and compute provider might evolve as the company grows. Then, Emad and Lukas discuss what the future might hold in store: big models vs "optimal" models, better datasets, and more decentralization.

-

🎶 Special note: This week’s theme music was composed by Weights & Biases’ own Justin Tenuto with help from Harmonai’s Dance Diffusion.

-

Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-emad-mostaque

-

⏳ Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:42 How AI fits into the safety/security industry

09:33 Event matching and object detection

14:47 Running models on the right hardware

17:46 Scaling model evaluation

23:58 Monitoring and evaluation challenges

26:30 Identifying and sorting issues

30:27 Bridging vision and language domains

39:25 Challenges and promises of natural language technology

41:35 Production environment

43:15 Using synthetic data

49:59 Working with startups

53:55 Multi-task learning, meta-learning, and user experience

56:44 Optimization and testing across multiple platforms

59:36 Outro

-

Connect with Jehan and Motorola Solutions:

📍 Jehan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jehanw/

📍 Jehan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jehan/

📍 Motorola Solutions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MotoSolutions/

📍 Careers at Motorola Solutions: https://www.motorolasolutions.com/en_us/about/careers.html

-

💬 Host: Lukas Biewald

📹 Producers: Riley Fields, Angelica Pan, Lavanya Shukla, Anish Shah

-

Subscribe and listen to our podcast today!

👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​

👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​

👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​


Lukas Biewald hosts Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI, a series that moves beyond theoretical discussions to examine how artificial intelligence is actually built and deployed. Each episode features a direct, unscripted talk with a leading practitioner-you’ll hear from engineers and researchers at places like NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, and OpenAI. The focus is on the tangible challenges and breakthroughs they encounter, from initial research to the complex reality of putting models into production. This isn't about abstract futures; it's a grounded look at the decisions shaping the field right now. Biewald, bringing his perspective from Weights & Biases, steers conversations toward the practical trade-offs and collaborative efforts that define modern AI work. For anyone in technology or business who wants to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this podcast offers a rare, candid window into the process. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how ideas become functional systems and what it really takes to operate at the cutting edge.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Podcast Episodes
Pieter Abbeel — Robotics, Startups, and Robotics Startups [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:17
Pieter is the Chief Scientist and Co-founder at Covariant, where his team is building universal AI for robotic manipulation. Pieter also hosts The Robot Brains Podcast, in which he explores how far humanity has come in i…
Chris Albon — ML Models and Infrastructure at Wikimedia [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:15
In this episode we're joined by Chris Albon, Director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation.Lukas and Chris talk about Wikimedia's approach to content moderation, what it's like to work in a place so transparen…
Emily M. Bender — Language Models and Linguistics [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:55
In this episode, Emily and Lukas dive into the problems with bigger and bigger language models, the difference between form and meaning, the limits of benchmarks, and why it's important to name the languages we study.Sho…
Josh Bloom — The Link Between Astronomy and ML [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:08:16
Josh explains how astronomy and machine learning have informed each other, their current limitations, and where their intersection goes from here.
Xavier Amatriain — Building AI-powered Primary Care [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:09
Xavier shares his experience deploying healthcare models, augmenting primary care with AI, the challenges of "ground truth" in medicine, and robustness in ML. --- Xavier Amatriain is co-founder and CTO of Curai, an ML-ba…
Spence Green — Enterprise-scale Machine Translation [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:46
Spence shares his experience creating a product around human-in-the-loop machine translation, and explains how machine translation has evolved over the years. --- Spence Green is co-founder and CEO of Lilt, an AI-powered…
Roger & DJ — The Rise of Big Data and CA's COVID-19 Response [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:53
Roger and DJ share some of the history behind data science as we know it today, and reflect on their experiences working on California's COVID-19 response. --- Roger Magoulas is Senior Director of Data Strategy at Astron…
Amelia & Filip — How Pandora Deploys ML Models into Production [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:49
Amelia and Filip give insights into the recommender systems powering Pandora, from developing models to balancing effectiveness and efficiency in production. --- Amelia Nybakke is a Software Engineer at Pandora. Her team…
Luis Ceze — Accelerating Machine Learning Systems [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:28
From Apache TVM to OctoML, Luis gives direct insight into the world of ML hardware optimization, and where systems optimization is heading. --- Luis Ceze is co-founder and CEO of OctoML, co-author of the Apache TVM Proje…