Key Stable Diffusion Researchers Leave Stability AI As Company Flounders

Key members of the artificial intelligence research team that developed Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image generation model that helped catalyze the AI boom, have resigned from British AI unicorn Stability AI, Forbes has learned.

The news was announced by CEO Emad Mostaque at an all-hands meeting last week, according to staff on the call and other sources familiar with the situation. Robin Rombach, who led the team, and fellow researchers Andreas Blattmann and Dominik Lorenz were three of the five authors who developed the core Stable Diffusion research while at a German university. They were hired afterwards by Stability. Last month, they helped publish a third edition of the Stable Diffusion model that for the first time combined the diffusion structure used in earlier versions with transformers used in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Their departures are the latest blow to the once-hot AI company, which has seen a mass exodus of executives as its cash reserves dwindle and it struggles to raise additional funds.