AI Hole From fundraising more than $100 million at the end of 2022 to hemorrhaging top talent by mid-2023, Stability AI — the firm that funds and supports development of the open source Stable Diffusion image generator — has had a helluva year. As Bloomberg reports, the San Francisco-based AI firm has had a bevy of issues, from accusations that its CEO Emad Mostaque doesn’t know how to run a business to claims that the company hadn’t paid a $70,000 bill. Chief among Stability’s difficulties is its talent exodus. This summer alone, the firm has seen resignations from its chief operating officer, chief information officer, head of research, and VP of engineering, just to name a few. Though Mostaque insists that “churn” is a common practice in startups while trying to establish “cultural fit” between employee and company, interviews with several former and current people involved with the project say the CEO’s lofty vision often doesn’t match up to the reality of his day-to-day ability as a business leader. Embellishments A particularly eyebrow-raising claim, per multiple unnamed Bloomberg sources, is that the 40-year-old CEO has claimed he was employed as a spy for the British government. He also insists that he’s spoken to more than one prime minister about building AI for nation-states. This Bloomberg report isn’t the first time the CEO’s apparent propensity for embellishment has been in the news. Earlier this summer, Forbes published an exposé that highlighted his “history of exaggeration,” and in its opening lines notes…The Company Behind Stable Diffusion Appears to Be Crumbling Into Chaos