jacky2wong

What I loved about this release was that it was hyped up by a polymarket leak with insider trading - NOT with nonsensical feel the AGI hype. Great model that's pushed the frontier of spatial reasoning by a long shot.

Surprised to see the list of companies using AWS powertools

I love this library - I'm surprised cohere doesn't jump in and have its logo in the front!

Yes - open source is a good go to market strategy. They should not open source if there's no good, strong business strategy around how they plan to commercialize. But there are many ways to commercialize an open source model. For many it's lead generation into a paid offering or a managed offering of the open source model.

Thanks for linking. I agree and strongly believe product companies are in the best position to monetize Gen AI. Existing distribution channels + companies being extremely fast to add AI features.

Where start-ups like Stability need to be rising to compete will have to be AI-native e.g. products re-thought of from the ground up like an AI image editor or as foundation-level AI research companies, agents or AI infrastructure companies.

There's no reason Stability can't play in both B2B and API if planned and strategized well and OpenAI can definitely pull it off with their tech and talent. But Stability has a few important differentiators from OpenAI where I believe if they launch an AI-native product in the multimodal space, they stand to differentiate significantly: - People join because they believed in Emad's vision of open source so it is their job to figure out a commercial model for open source. They can retain AI talent by ensuring a commitment to open source here. If they need to ensure their moat is retained and can commercialize, they should delay releasing model weights until a product surrounding the weights has been released first. Still open source and open weights but give them time to figure out a commercial strategy to capitalize their research. However because of this promise, they will not be able to license their technology to other companies. - Stability's strong research DNA (unsure about their engineering) is so badly fumbled by a lack of a cohesive product strategy that it leads to sub-par product releases. In agreement to the 3 'layers' argument, that's exactly Stability's greatest strength and weakness. Their focus on foundational models is incredibly strong and has come at the cost of the interface layer (and ultimately the data layer as it has a flywheel effect).

The company currently screams a need for effective leadership that can add on interface and data layers to their product strategy so they can build a strong moat outside of a strong research team which has shown it can disappear at any moment...

I think Stability is in an interesting situation. A few suggestions on its direction and current state: 1. Stability AI's loss of talent at the foundational research layer is worrying. They've lost an incredibly expensive moat and there's enough unsolved problems in the foundation layer (faster models, more energy efficient models, etc.) to ensure Stability provides differentiated offerings. Step 1 should be rectifying the core issues of employment and refocusing this more into the AI lab space. I have no doubt this will require a re-steering of the ship and re-focusing of the "mission". 2. Stability AI's "mission" of building models for every modality everywhere has caused the company to lose focus. Resources are spread thin. With $100M in funding, there should be a pointed focus in certain areas - such as imaging or video. Midjourney has shown there is sufficient value capture already in just 1 modality. E.g. StableLM seems like early revenue rush and a bad bet with poor differentiation. 3. There is sufficient competition on the API layer. Stability's commitment to being open-source will continue to entice researchers and developers but there should be a re-focus on improvements in the applied layer. Deep UX wrappers for image editing and video editing while owning the end to end stack for image generation or video generation would be a great focal point for Stability that separates itself from the competition. People don't pay for images, they pay for images that solves their problems.

Thanks for linking!

Good point - I'll research and create a more recent list.

Definitely. These solopreneurs all kept trying after failing and I wanted to share a bit of their story!

Fair point although entering a new industry often requires starting completely from scratch.

I wanted to get people's feedback on a community I'm thinking of building. A community for people who are building one-person businesses (also accepting solo-founders). Being a solopreneur is hard. You face problems no one else seems to understand. We don't all live in the SF bubble and often we don't have people to emotionally resonate with who understand what we're trying to do. Usually - you have to do it all. I searched online and it looks like solopreneurs are a growing category and while they often might find co-founders later on - starting out as a solopreneur is often also a good way to get the ball rolling. We can figure out game-tips and plans for people running these businesses (e.g. VAs that are amazing + how to screen for great VAs in seconds).

For those interested, I have a link for a form for people to fill in if there's interest - https://tally.so/r/3xaxlE

VoiceReplace is now in early alpha. We built the tool to help people tackle voice insecurities when they create videos. We are thinking of expanding this into a marketing tool for social media/SEO content. Would love HN's feedback on what the potential use cases can be!