You made a point about devs underappreciating the work of other professionals, like CEOs and designers. You made this point in the context of Emad and the success story that is Stable Diffusion. The implication in your point is that Emad surely contributed to the success, even though the CEO is not a developer or researcher. My counter to your point is that Emad wasn't there when the inventions were made. He joined the party after success was already evident. Emad's main contribution to the success of Stable Diffusion is that he funded the training of a large model. That's great, but this thing would've happened with or without him. The inventions were made before he funded the training of SD1.4.

If Emad had been supporting the research team from the beginning, one might argue that he created the conditions for their success, or whatever. But he wasn't there at that time.

None of this is related to whatever Emad is accused of. I'm just making a point about how we attribute contribution for success.

This is 100% correct. Emad tried to lure me into the trap that Eleuther eventually fell into, and I lucked out by blowing him off after getting weird vibes from him. This was back when he was unknown, but was running around offering a bunch of researchers massive GPU cluster time for seemingly altruistic reasons but were in fact creepy reasons. In reality he wanted his name on their work.

I have the DMs to prove this, and have not ever said something like this about someone. I wouldn’t make this accusation lightly, for whatever it’s worth. In the HN discussion of that article, I had left a comment, which Emad DMed me on Twitter about, saying no no, he never lied to investors, and tried to convince me that what I was saying wasn’t true. I was wondering why he cared so much. In retrospect it’s probably because it was correct.

I’ve never worked with him, to be clear, and the few colleagues who have worked at Stability have had generally positive things to say. But there was one that was screwed over by them hard (he was doing contract work, and never got paid for it), and I can think of at least four other alarming data points that all point to the same thing.

It’s unsettling not knowing whether to speak up about this. On one hand it doesn’t really matter that much. On the other hand, it’s the fundamental difference between a CEO that tends to IPO vs one that tends to fail. I hate seeing people fail, and I genuinely thought that my feelings about Emad were mistaken since empirically they were doing fine. Turns out, nope, not fine, and the original impression was right. Weird experience.