No Priors Ep. 3 | With Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque

(music plays) Emad, welcome to No Biased.

Thank you for having me on, Sara. You're loud.

Let's start with a personal story. You have a background in computer science, and you were working in the hedge fund world. Uh, that's a, a hard left turn, or it looks like it, from, um, that world to being a driving force in the AI state of the art. How did you end up working in this field?

Uh, yeah, I've always been interested in kind of AI and technology. Um, so on the hedge fund, I was one of the largest investors in video games and artificial intelligence. But then my real interest came when my son was diagnosed with autism, and, uh, I was told there was no cure or treatment. And I was like, "Uh, well, let's try and see what we can do." So I built up a team and did AI-based literature review, this was about 12 years ago, of the existing, um, treatments and papers to try and figure out commonalities, and then did some, uh, kind of, uh, biomolecular pathway analysis of neurotransmitters for drug repurposing, and came down to a few different things that could be causing it. You know, worked with doctors to treat him, and he went to mainstream school, and that was fantastic. Went back to running a hedge fund, won some awards, and then I was like, "Let's try and make the world better." And so the first one was, uh, non-AI enhanced education tablets for refugees and others. Um, that's Imagine Worldwide, my co-founder's charity. And then in 2020, COVID came, and I saw something like autism, a multi-systemic condition, the existing mechanisms that extrapolated the future from the past wouldn't be able to keep up with, and thought, "Could we use AI to make this understandable?" And so I set up an AI initiative with the World Bank, UNESCO and others, to try and understand what caused COVID, um, and try and make that available to everyone. Then I hit the institutional wall (laughs) in a variety of places and realized that, uh, the models and technologies that had evolved were far beyond anything that happened before, and there were some interesting arbitrage opportunities, uh, from a business perspective, and more than that, a bit of a moral imperative to make this technology available to everyone, 'cause we're now going to very narrow superhuman performance, and, uh, everyone should have access to that.

Uh, it's an amazing journey and, uh, congratulations on all the impact you've already had. So as you say, um, or as you imply, the AI field in recent years has been increasingly driven by labs and private companies, and one of the most obvious paths to performance progress is to just make models bigger, right? Scaling data parameters, GPUs, which is very expensive. Um, and then in, in reaction, just to set the stage a little bit, there's been some efforts over the, uh, previous years to be more community-driven and open and build alternatives like Eleuther. How did you start engaging in that, and how did Stability change the game here?