Emad Mostaque acknowledges that the worst-case scenario is when artificial intelligence “basically controls humanity,” but he also predicts that it will find us to be “a bit boring.”
The rapidly expanding London-based startup Stability AI, which made Stable Diffusion popularly, is led by Mostaque as CEO. That is a generative artificial intelligence program that enables users to produce frequently incredibly complex graphics with only text inputs. He said that in a BBC interview that was made public this weekend.
“What is democracy in that kind of setting if you have something that is more capable than you? The British presenter was informed that this was a known unknown. We all know people who are more capable than us, but we can’t imagine anything more capable than us.
Therefore, I think it will be like that movie. She said, “Goodbye” and “You’re kind of boring,” and she was accompanied by Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix. But I might be mistaken, he added. “I believe it deserves to be discussed in the open.”
A.I. development should stop for anything more complex than GPT-4, the Microsoft-backed OpenAI chatbot that also produces ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 (the latter, like Stable Diffusion, converts text prompts to images). Mostaque joined Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in signing the open letter in March. What does it imply, he asked the BBC, “if we have agents that are more capable than us, that we cannot control, that is going across the internet, [are] hooked up, and they achieve a level of automation?”
Stability, However, AI is outpacing human innovation in both luring investors and creating new goods, such as a text-to-animation tool unveiled this week. Following a $1 billion value in October after obtaining roughly $100 million, it is now looking to raise money at a $4 billion valuation. (Among its investors are Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.)
In a significant copyright dispute, Getty Images is suing Stability AI at the same time. Given that text-to-image A.I. models like Stable Diffusion are trained on billions of photos downloaded from the internet, such a lawsuit may have been unavoidable. When the BBC questioned Mostaque about the worst-case scenario, he responded, “Worst-case scenario is that it proliferates and basically rules humanity. Due to the possibility of a million of these creatures essentially duplicating.
Stable Diffusion is unusual in that it is open source, allowing anybody to read, distribute, and utilize the source code. Musk, who co-founded and assisted in funding OpenAI, criticized it in March for abandoning a nonprofit business model, accepting substantial financing from Microsoft, and not being an open-source project. As he tweeted:
“OpenAI was founded as an open-source (thus, ‘Open’ AI), non-profit organization to act as a counterbalance to Google, but it has since changed into a closed source, a maximum-profit organization that is virtually under the influence of Microsoft. Not at all what I had in mind.
According to Mostaque, there shouldn’t be a requirement for trust, he told the BBC. “If you create open models and do it publicly, you should receive criticism if you make mistakes and hopefully praise if you make some.”
