An anonymous reader writes: The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI’s popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque’s downfall — because he couldn’t find a way to pay for them. According to an extensive expose citing company documents and dozens of persons familiar with the matter, it’s indicated that the British model builder’s extreme infrastructure costs drained its coffers, leaving the biz with just $4 million in reserve by last October. Stability rented its infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and GPU-centric cloud operator CoreWeave, at a reported cost of around $99 million a year. That’s on top of the $54 million in wages and operating expenses required to keep the AI upstart afloat.
What’s more, it appears that a sizable portion of the cloudy resources Stability AI paid for were being given away to