Stability spokesperson Bishara said the spouses had been “making loans to and from the business” and that “any amounts owed from or to Mostaque and Qureshi were settled in full before the end of 2022.” (“There were several issues that were expeditiously resolved,” Bishara said.) At the same time that workers faced payday uncertainties, Mostaque’s wife Zehra Qureshi, who was head of PR and later assumed a seat on the company’s board of directors, transferred tens of thousands of pounds out of the company’s bank account, per several sources and screenshots of financial transactions viewed by Forbes. Inside the company, wages and payroll taxes have been repeatedly delayed or unpaid, according to eight former employees, and last year the UK tax agency threatened to seize company assets. Bishara said the company could not comment on the presentations “without knowing the exact version,” but that they were accompanied by additional data and documentation. Mostaque’s other mischaracterizations to investors include multiple fundraising decks seen by Forbes that presented the OECD, WHO and World Bank as Stability’s partners at the time - which all three organizations deny. And when pressed, Stability spokesperson Motez Bishara admitted to Forbes that Stability had no special deal with Amazon. AI researchers with whom Mostaque worked told Forbes he claimed credit he did not earn or deserve. students from Ommer’s lab.īut to build buzz around Stability, Mostaque made an elaborate gambit supported by exaggerated claims and promises, overstating his role in several major AI projects and embellishing a quotidian transaction with the notoriously uncompromising Amazon into a “strategic partnership” with an 80% discount. Among the 140-person staff: a vice president of research and development who was a Nvidia director another research head who came from Google Brain and three Ph.D. More premier talent has followed since the cash injection last summer. “He’s probably the most visionary person I've ever met,” says Christian Cantrell, who left a two-decade career at Adobe to join Stability in October (he quit six months later and launched his own startup). Mostaque’s vision for open-source AI has mesmerized other longtime technologists. Mostaque recently dined with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos reclusive Google cofounder Sergey Brin made a rare public appearance at Stability’s ritzy launch party in San Francisco last October. In May, the White House named Stability alongside Microsoft and Nvidia as one of the seven “leading AI developers” which would collaborate on a landmark federal AI safety initiative. By October, Stable Diffusion had 10 million daily users, Mostaque told Bloomberg. After Stable Diffusion went viral last summer, blue-chip venture capital firms Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners poured in $100 million, giving Mostaque’s London-based startup a $1 billion valuation.
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