Mostaque knew all the answers, but investors still lost their confidence. Four months after publication, investors from Coatue as well as Lightspeed quit the board. They were no longer confident in the venture. The company’s chief operating officer (COO), general counsel and human resource head had also left by the end of that year. Stability would lose many of its prominent researchers. Under pressure from investors, Mostaque finally left the company on March 22, 2024—just a few weeks after Lady Gaga’s greenhouse soiree.
Akkaraju, Parker and Parker did not waste any time taking control of Stability. Parker was appointed chairman of the board and Akkaraju became CEO. Although Mostaque claims to have offered support, they never spoke with him.
For the time being, they set to work on remaking Stability AI. Soon after, competition became fierce. In September of that year, Runway was launched. signed the AI industry’s first big deal With a film studio. Runway will have access to Lionsgate’s exclusive catalog of films as training material and tools. “The time it takes to go from idea to execution is just shrinking—like a lot,” says Cristóbal Valenzuela, CEO of Runway. “You can do things in just a couple of minutes that used to take two weeks.” He predicts that in the next few years, “you will have teams of two, three, four people making the work that used to require armies and hundreds of millions of dollars.”
As a result of the deal with Lionsgate, Hollywood’s AI has been pushed into hyperdrive. “I can tell you, last year when I came to Los Angeles versus today, it’s night and day,” Amit Jain is the CEO of Luma – another competitor to Stability. “Last year it was ‘Let’s prototype, let’s proof-of-concept’—they were deferring the inevitable. This year it’s a whole different tone.”
Moonvalley is an AI firm founded by Google DeepMind former researchers. It’s also the parent of Asteria AI Film Studio, cofounded by actor Natasha Lyonne. told Time magazine that more than a dozen major Hollywood studios are testing its latest model—signaling openness to the technology, if not yet a full embrace.
“It was really about me and Sean coming in and providing that direction, that leadership, and really taking advantage of what we call the three T’s: timing, team, and technology,” Akkaraju says.
It’s not his TED Talk, but his mansion in Beverly Hills worth $20,000,000. I sit on a white overstuffed sofa overlooking a beautifully manicured garden. Akkaraju has a white smile, a button up shirt that reveals his biceps and is in good shape. Both his eye contact and handshake is equally powerful.
Akkaraju claims that he made the decision early in his tenure to stop competing with OpenAI. Google Building frontier models. The company would then create applications that could be layered on top, saving the huge costs of computing. Akkaraju was able to negotiate a deal with Stability AI’s cloud computing providers, which erased the massive debt of the company. Akkaraju’s spokesperson refused to give any details on the deal. However, investors came back in droves.
