AI governance is a hard problem, and Emad Mostaque wants to spread the workload. Credit: Lee Charlie / Shutterstock Emad Mostaque stepped down as CEO of Stability AI, the developer of the Stable Diffusion image generation tool, over the weekend, saying he wanted to “fix” the concentration of power in AI. The company said he had also quit its board of directors, which had appointed COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte as interim co-CEOs while seeking a replacement for him. Board chairman Jim O’Shaughnessy thanked Mostaque for “his leadership and relentless commitment to Stability AI and the open source movement,” in a statement confirming the changes. On Twitter/X, Mostaque said that his shares of Stability have a majority vote and give him full board control. Having one person hold this kind of power in a company, or a having few companies dominate the industry, seems to bother him, though. “We should have more transparent and distributed governance in AI as it becomes more and more important,” he wrote. “The concentration of power in AI is bad for us all. I decided to step down to fix this at Stability & elsewhere.” “It’s a hard problem, but I think we can fix it,” he wrote, hinting that he has a plan by adding, “Will be sharing more soon.” Mostaque’s concerns about the centralization of generative AI are understandable, but not everyone is convinced that’s really what’s going on in the industry now. Diversity in AI “All of these companies have their own models,” said NYU Tandon school of engineering associate professor Chinmay Hegde, “so it’s a very big and diverse landscape — I wouldn’t call the situation tending toward centralized.” Many of the most prominent AI models are closed source, with Meta being a notable exception among the major players but the number of AI models available, coupled with the relative novelty of the technology on the commercial market, creates a certain amount of diversity. “This is all very nascent,” said Hegde. “We’re about 18 months removed from the first wave of [generative AI] coming out. The closed-source nature of many of the most popular AIs — Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and so on — may be closer to the heart of Mostaque’s concerns about the state of the industry. Hegde noted that it’s important to retain a diverse landscape of AIs, particularly those that are open source, to address many of the key issues facing generative AI. “There are issues surrounding copyright which are being debated in the courts right now, [and] issues related to bias and other harms,” he said. “These questions are very much part of ongoing research in the community, and removing access to these models means that fewer resources are being devoted to these very important problems.” Stability isn’t without other issues, according to Hegde, making it far from unique among AI startups. Reports indicate that a number of researchers have left the company recently, and smaller AI companies are facing some common headwinds. “These smaller AI startups are burning a lot of money and there’s not a lot of differentiation between the companies,” Hegde said. “So it’s hard to see where the long-term revenue is going to come from.” Mostaque could not immediately be reached for comment. Related content brandpost Sponsored by Adobe 5 use cases for how Generative AI can supercharge document productivity across the enterprise Take a closer look at real-world examples of how we are using GenAI to turn document data into peak productivity. By Maro Eremyan May 08, 2024 6 mins Generative AI feature New US CIO appointments, May 2024 Congratulations to these 'movers and shakers' recently hired or promoted into a new chief information officer, senior IT, or board role. By Martha Heller May 08, 2024 9 mins CIO Careers IT Leadership feature The extent Automic’s group CIO goes to reconcile data Cathy O'Sullivan, CIO editor-in-chief for APAC, recently sat with Marcelo Dantas, group CIO at Automic Group, to discuss completing one of the largest-ever registry services transitions in Australia, keeping pace with technology, and why cyberse By CIO staff May 08, 2024 9 mins CIO Cloud Native Data Quality feature Expion Health revamps its RFP process with AI The healthcare cost management firm built a customized AI tool to streamline an error-prone process for gaining new customers. Now, it’s considering selling the project for external use. By Grant Gross May 08, 2024 6 mins CIO 100 Healthcare Industry Digital Transformation PODCASTS VIDEOS RESOURCES EVENTS SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe