Author | Little Black Rabbit Sam
Editor | Yang Xinyan
Editor | Wang
01Who is Emad Mostaque?
Emad Mostaque, born in April 1983, is a typical Aries. The biggest difference between him and people like Sun Ge is that Emad truly believes that AI can change the world and make our future better.
Emad was born into a Bangladeshi Muslim family in Jordan. He was taken to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, when he was one month old, and immigrated to the UK with his family when he was seven years old.
When Emad was young, his parents found that he was a very smart child, but he was always irritable and liked to snatch toys from other children. When he was in elementary school, he liked to pull the braids of Charlotte, the girl in front of him. The incidence of ADHD in India and Bangladesh is one in a thousand, and his parents were very worried about it. In order to release Emad's energy and energy that has nowhere to go, Emad's father, who is a business lecturer in London, decided to give his beloved son, who was one in a thousand and suffered from "Asperger's syndrome (ADHD)," a special training:
“British Accent Training Program”
The original purpose of this project was to enable Emad to use his intelligence and authentic British accent to serve as a tour guide and guide for Bangladeshi compatriots who come to the UK for tourism and study.
As a result, as time went by, Emad's growth path gradually changed a little bit...
02 The reckless 20-year-old
Emad's youth is vague. The only thing we know is that from the age of 10 to 19, he attended the top-ranked secondary school in the UK: Westminster School (also known as Westminster Abbey School). The school has excellent academic performance and is known as the "Oxford and Cambridge manufacturing machine."
Hurun and HSBC jointly released the 2024 Global High School Rankings
Westminster School ranked first in the world
PS: I don’t know if Emad is like Justin Sun, who casually wrote an article titled “On the Positioning and Development of Muslim People in the British Empire” and impressed the admissions committee of Oxford University, and successfully got the offer from Oxford.
In any case, what we know is that in 2002, 19-year-old Emad, like countless of his seniors in history, as a descendant of Bangladesh, carried the hopes of his fellow countrymen and entered Oxford University, one of the top two universities in the UK. Considering that it would be difficult to improve his outstanding language talent and ability, Emad immediately decided to study computer and mathematics (Maths & Computer Science Department) to expand his science and engineering thinking.
Looking back now, this decision was a very wise one, because from the early 2000s to 2005 when Emad was studying, people who were familiar with science and engineering thinking and had a cheerful personality and charisma were very rare.
Emad, he walks with the wind.
One year after graduating from college, Emad married his lifelong love Zehra Qureshi. They had two children and successfully joined Hedge Fund() to engage in crude oil trading. Since Emad himself is a Muslim, and in his 20s, he was keen to help the Muslim community create online forums and provide some indirect help on AI.
Emad and his wife Zehra Qureshi in August 2006
Because Emad found his unfair advantage, he got the opportunity to advise governments on Middle East affairs and Islamism, which laid a solid foundation for Emad to later come into contact with top resources such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization (although the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the World Bank later denied having any cooperation with Emad, it did not affect Emad's ability to make money: this is a long story, and I can explain it in one sentence: Emad's audience is very receptive to this).
From 2005 to 2020, Emad traded in stocks and cryptocurrencies, and also established many companies and government cooperation projects.
Emad’s cunningness made him quickly become a portfolio manager, and he invested in many video games and AI projects, and made a lot of money. More than 10 years later, Emad summarized his life before Stability AI() very insightfully:
On the road of helping the rich get richer, Emad also made some money. In August 2009, at the age of 26, Emad successfully bought a 3-bedroom ground floor apartment with an area of 167 square meters in Iverna Gardens, a wealthy area in London at the junction of Chelsea and Kensington, for 1.7 million pounds!
Just one year after the 2008 economic crisis, Emad, who was only 26 years old, was able to spend 1.7 million pounds to buy a luxury house in London's wealthy area.
According to the data from the UK version of Lianjia Zoopla, the current market price of a similar apartment to this house is 3.25 million pounds, which is a 91% increase compared to when Emad bought the house! In other words, the annualized return on the property has reached 4.4% in 15 years. It has to be said that investors have extraordinary vision.
03 Positive vs negative, how does Emad knock on the door of AI?
Hold on a second. At this point, do you realize that something seems a little off? How come the plot so far looks like a cool story of a second-generation immigrant who wins in life?
Positive: Left the hedge fund, cured his autistic son and embarked on the path of AI
Since 2011, Emad, as a "high flying smart young guy", was forced to stop from his original track because his son was diagnosed with autism.
Emad himself has a background in computer science and mathematics. When the doctor told him that autism could not be cured or treated, Emad began to be really interested in AI. He wondered if he could use AI to subvert the problem of autism if traditional treatments did not work, that is, to use Elon Mush's "First Principle" to break down the problem.
First, he set up an AI team to crawl all the available autism-related literature on the market to find commonalities. During the algorithm analysis process, they gradually converged on one direction: the balance of GABA-glutamate in the brain.
Finally, Emad used AI and the help of doctors to successfully help his son with autism improve his language skills and attend a normal school by drug-repurposing.
After completing his son's treatment, Emad returned to the hedge fund and began to seriously invest in research related to medicine and autism. A representative work is that Emad is the technical architecture leader of the Collective and Augmented Intelligence Against COVID-19 (CAIAC) project at Stanford University.
Emad shared his technical experience in fighting COVID-19 at the 2020 Stanford CAIAC program
The reverse side: Different behind-the-scenes stories, 6 failed entrepreneurial experiences in Chelsea
According to gov.uk, Emad started six businesses in his mansion starting at the age of 30. His first company was called ANANAS Network, which was promoted as a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the use of artificial intelligence for social welfare.
The company, which had only Emad and his sister-in-law Aisha Qureshi (born in 1991), went bankrupt five years later.
Emad's sister-in-law: Zeenat qureshi
Between 2013 and 2014, Emad registered and established five other companies in his mansion, ranging from Muslim consulting business to venture capital. However, in these latter companies, Emad did not continue to let his sister-in-law work for him, but instead held the controlling shares personally.
Not surprisingly, these companies all went bankrupt (Dissolved) within 1-5 years.
On a rainy day in 2017, Emad, whose company had closed down again, took a selfie on the streets of London.
However, from Emad's analysis of the high point of BTC in December 2017, he made a lot of money by shorting. During that wave of market, BTC fell from the highest point of nearly 20,000 US dollars (December 2017) to 3,000 US dollars (December 2018). This wave of perpetual contract shorting has accumulated a large amount of assets for Emad, which may be the blessing that Emad has received for helping his son treat autism.
04 Standing on the top of the wave: Founding Stability AI
Since Emad is a man of extraordinary talent, he made a fortune in the crypto market while curing his child. So at this time, he stopped pursuing the low-level interests of making money and began to think seriously about a question: "Can I make some big deals in the AI era?"
The answer is yes. On November 4, 2019, Emad started the world-famous Stability AI in a chicken shop in Fora-United House (a co-working space similar to WeWork) one mile away from his home (maybe because he loves chicken too much). No one would have thought that it was this company that transformed Emad from an unknown hedge fund manager and a first-class roast turkey expert into a big internet celebrity that cannot be ignored in the AI world!
Stability AI's London locations
First-class turkey chef, Bangladesh carefully selected: Emad brand turkey, friends will miss it after eating it
Because of his in-depth understanding of the crypto world, Emad initially wanted to make Stability a DAO, but later found that this was not feasible given the current state of DAO development, so he finally chose a centralized approach. If you look at the angel investors of Stability AI, they are Seed Club Ventures and other crypto funds. The second round was in October 2022, when Lightspeed Venture Partners came in and raised $100 million in the seed round.
Lightspeed led this round of investment after the release of Stable Diffusion. According to Emad, Stability AI provided GPU support and sponsorship to the technical team behind the model, and helped the famous tall professor from the University of Munich (LMU), Professor Björn Ommer, who is more than 2 meters tall, to lead the development (interestingly, one year before the release of Stable Diffusion, Ommer had just jumped from Heidelberg University to LMU. At that time, I don’t know if Heidelberg broke its thigh because of letting Ommer go).
Björn Ommer and his students
05The shocking controversy caused by Stable Diffusion
But is this really the case? Forbes revealed in a long article that the source code of Stable Diffusion, which made Stability AI famous, was actually written by another group of researchers.
In June 2023, Kenrick Cai, a Chinese full-time writer for Forbes, criticized in detail the big melon behind Emad and his business empire.
Kenrick Cai
There is too much content in this section, so we will only talk about the essentials:
Stable Diffusion is actually based on the Latent Diffusion Model developed by Professor Björn Ommer's team at the University of Munich (LMU) in Germany (published at the top computer vision conference CVPR2022). In June, Emad saw this achievement at the CVPR conference and took the initiative to provide computing power to Björn Ommer's team. With the powerful computing power, the Latent Diffusion Model became stronger and more stable. In August, this optimized new model was named Stable Diffusion and released under the name of Stability AI.
Runway, an early participant, has not received the same reputation and valuation as Stability AI. It can be understood that Emad obtained the naming rights of Stable Diffusion with his keen vision and generous GPU donation, and it is firmly tied to his Stability AI!
Latent Diffusion model (Stable Diffusion)
Within days of the launch of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI received $100 million in funding from Coatue and Lightspeed Fund, which is eight times the amount of money Emad had previously raised.
This round of financing directly pushed Stability AI's valuation to over US$1 billion, even though the company was not yet profitable.
But in subsequent press releases, it was only stated that the company behind Stable Diffusion was Stability AI, without mentioning the contributions of the German university and Runway, one of the video generation giants from New York.
Professor Ommer was of course unhappy about this; he wanted his lab to get publicity, but the press department at his university was on vacation at the time (Germans were full of relaxation).
Professor Ommer said in an interview with Forbes, “As far as I know, when we released Latent Diffusion, Stability AI had no idea about it. They jumped on the bandwagon later.”
After experiencing a series of dramas, Professor Ommer said: "What I learned from this lesson is that if your company has a strong news department, you can change the facts and reshape history at will."
It can be said that Emad is well versed in the art of catching up with the competition. He played the Ommer of the University of Munich and Valenzuela, the CEO of Runway, in his hands:
In this way, Emad successfully stole the fruits of victory and, as a newcomer, gained great honor in the field that he had studied for many years in German and American academic institutions.
Despite the controversy, Emad is still the winner in the AIGC field in 2022. By October, Stable Diffusion had reached 10 million daily active users. In May 2023, the White House nominated Stability, Microsoft, and Nvidia as the seven leading AI developers to jointly carry out the federal AI security plan (this time, Emad's partners have taken down the White House after the United Nations and the World Health Organization).
He had dinner with Jeff Bezos, and the retired Google founder Sergey Brin also made a rare appearance at the Stability AI conference. After the successful financing in October, the team has grown rapidly, including the R&D VP who was once a director of Nvidia, the head of Google Brain, and the student author behind Stable Diffusion from Professor Ommer's laboratory...
Emad and Jeff Bezos
Although in the Forbes in-depth article, Emad appeared as follows:
Falsified academic qualifications - Emad does not have a master's degree. In fact, a master's degree from Oxford University is automatically awarded a few years after graduation from undergraduate studies.
Unpaid wages - Eric, a former intern, once reported the problem of unpaid wages. He said, "I am still waiting for the money that should have been reimbursed to me last August."
Embezzlement of public funds - tens of thousands of pounds were transferred from Stability AI's company account to Emad's wife's personal account.
Touching Amazon and Midjourney - Emad once described Midjourney as part of its ecosystem, but Midjourney founder David Holz said that Mostaque only provided a small donation, and other than that, Midjourney has nothing to do with Stability AI.
Copyright Infringement - Stability AI is also facing two lawsuits, both related to training models in violation of copyright law, using the LAION-5B dataset to train commercial models.
But Emad is still active in front of the stage, moving among Internet celebrities, investment institutions, and the media, like a drunken butterfly. Even in March 2024, after Emad announced his resignation, he was still actively active in various occasions, without any intention of being defeated by negative news.
06 Qingke Exclusive: The Exclusive Truth about Emad and Stability AI
But according to our exclusive investigation, the real Emad is not so bad. "Emad is a very pure person, especially to researchers, he is very sincere. Although many things are not true and seem unreliable to ordinary people, he really likes AI. Unlike those who cheat people by selling courses, he does not use it as a tool to make money. In the end, when Emad left Stability AI, he did not get much incentive and benefits, but he still has no regrets." - Xiao Ming next door said that because of his "Asperger's syndrome", he is very charming, enthusiastic, kind, but also forgetful and disorganized.
Reality 1: Stability AI’s difficult financing process and the huge conflict with seed round investor Coatue led to his resignation
Faced with the sky-high server costs of Stable Diffusion at the time, Emad did his best to connect with every investor and institution willing to talk to him. It was not until Coatue and Light Speed received $101 million in seed round financing that Emad paid off the GPU server fees owed to AWS.
After Sri Viswanath, a partner of Coatue, joined the board of directors of Stability AI, he was angered by the company's chaotic strategy and frequent changes. Although he praised the vision of founder Emad, he later lost interest in the company. Coatue, which was behind him, asked Stability to provide product plans and roadmaps, but nothing happened after the documents were submitted.
Sri Viswanath (Coatue partner, graduated from Stanford University)
In early 2023, Viswanath's suspicion of Emad intensified, and he suggested replacing the CEO. In June of the same year, Forbes exposed negative news about Emad, exacerbating the conflict between the two sides. Coatue tried to help with recruitment and publicity, but after the news broke, it distanced itself from Stability AI, and the relationship between Viswanath and Emad deteriorated.
At the end of 2023, Emad's relationship with investors further deteriorated, and Coatue and Lightspeed, the lead investors in the seed round, announced their withdrawal from the board of directors. Coatue gave up its seat on October 5 due to a conflict with Intel Investment. On October 24, Coatue asked Emad to resign and negotiate a sale, requiring the disclosure of salary information and future bonuses to be approved by non-executive directors.
It can be said that the fact that Emad was backstabbed by Coatue and Lightspeed is an important factor in the development of Stability AI. In March 2024, Emad, who announced his resignation, never publicly said anything bad about Coatue and Lightspeed. Compared with what Coatue and Lightspeed did, Emad's courage and bravery in shouldering the responsibility is far beyond the reach of ordinary people.
Fact 2: Professor Björn Ommer overclaimed his contribution to Stable Diffusion
Professor Ommer’s criticism of Stable AI may be a bit exaggerated. In fact, Emad initially collaborated with Ommer’s doctoral students, not Ommer himself. The success of Stable Diffusion is mainly due to the efforts of Robin Rombach and others, not Ommer’s CVPR2022 paper.
Without Emad's promotion, Robin Rombach might not be so famous. At that time, it was almost impossible to make a model of several hundred MB public. Stable Diffusion was released in August 2022, more than half a year earlier than Llama. It can be said that without Emad, the entire generative AI () ecosystem might be very different. Without Stable Diffusion, it is unknown whether Meta and other companies would open source Llama and adopt the current open source strategy.
The open source of Stable Diffusion is undoubtedly a major change in the history of AI model ecology, and its contribution to Hugging Face, which is also invested by Coatue, is indelible. It is precisely because of this that Huggingface has almost monopolized the industrial-grade application market of Diffusion models with the open source framework diffusers.
From this perspective, Ommer's accusation may be a bit extreme. He may be angry just because Stability AI did not pay him directly. But throughout the process, Stability AI borne the entire training cost of the model, and doctoral students like Robin Rombach were also paid accordingly.
Reality 3: Runway ML deceived Stability AI and released Stable Diffusion v1.5 first, causing Stability AI to be passive
If we look at this from a side perspective: Patrick Esser (PE for short), the former tech lead of Runway and the author of the paper behind Stable Diffusion, left Runway in 2023 and came to Stability AI. He and Robin Rombach worked on SD3, and then they set up a new company together called Blackforest labs (incubated by A16Z).
If Runway is really fine, why would PE leave Runway and choose to join Stability AI? From this perspective, we can perhaps see the attitude of those involved in the game towards Runway and Stability AI. Perhaps those involved know best.
Reality 4: Paying out of your own pocket to reward employees, but accidentally forgetting your own business
Nathan Lile, former chief of staff at Stability AI who often traveled with Emad, recalled that Emad once had Wi-Fi problems on his phone during a layover. Emad walked into the terminal to find better Wi-Fi and a new SIM card. He returned half an hour later with a new pair of AirPods in his hands. It was a gift for Nathan Lile.
"I was completely touched by Emad's thoughtfulness!" Nathan said, this was an unexpected surprise. Emad said that this was to reward Nathan's unremitting efforts, so he paid for it out of his own pocket! When Nathan recalled the scene at that time, she said: "I remember at that moment, when Emad asked her if she had experienced spatial audio, how her eyes were shining with expectation."
As Nathan fiddled with the gift, Emad suddenly realized something: “I seem to have forgotten to buy a new SIM card!”
07 Say goodbye to pure AI and move towards Web3
Emad, who experienced "A bunch of bureaucracies" in the Web2 world, angrily chose to embrace Web3. There are luxury cars and beautiful women here, as well as a mature trading market that is not regulated (deliberately created to this effect).
Since working on his own projects was very fulfilling, Emad launched his own Web3+AI project: SchellingAI, more than two months after leaving his job.
According to Emad, this project aims to support open source models, data sets and source code by issuing coins, but the specific information is unknown.
Yes, it is August now, and the official Twitter of SchellingAI is still empty. Sure enough, Emad and his Web3 team have missed the deadline again.
The coin was supposed to be issued on July 20th, but as of press time, there is still nothing...
There isn't even an official website... This is consistent with everyone's perception of Emad...
I have unknowingly reached the end of the article, and my feeling is that the amazing Bangladeshi Emad Mostaque has set a benchmark for his life and completed a life journey that others "cannot imitate, let alone surpass."
I hope his Web3 project can bring something different to everyone!
