Exactly same for me too. I watched his interview with Aarthi and Sriram of a16z yesterday and the more I tried to understand him, more he seemed like not just a BS peddler but deluded as well. May be it is just the two of us?
What an incredible story – unfortunately for their investors, it reflects very poorly on them. It reads like there were quite a few prima facie yellow/orange flags that merited deeper due diligence.
Stablility AI has done squat for the locally hosted SD community. If I were a VC, I wouldn't touch these guys with a 10 foot pole, even if SDXL ends up being good.
But I dont think many are using SAI's cloud service. Its... Not, that great, maybe barring SDXL which is very new, and they have no advantage over random hosts.
Stability AI became a $1 billion company with the help of a viral AI text-to-image generator and — per interviews with more than 30 people — some misleading claims from founder Emad Mostaque
Personally, most of the issues seem superficial compared to, for example, Elon's pathological lying.