Lady Gaga probably wasn't thinking that a coup would unfold in her greenhouse. Then again, she was cohosting a party there with Sean Parker, the billionaire founder of Napster and first president of Facebook. It was February 2024, and the singer had invited guests to her 22.5 million oceanside estate in Malibu to mark the launch of a skin-care nonprofit. One of the organization's trustees was her boyfriend, whose day job was running the Parker Foundation. In the candlelit space, beside floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Pacific, Parker's people mingled with Gaga's, nibbling focaccia and branzino alla brace to music from a string quartet (Grammy-winning, of course).

During the Cerebral Valley AI Conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Emad Mostaque, the CEO and founder of Stability AI, revealed that he plans to take the open-source platform public within the next few years. Stability AI is a leader in generative artificial intelligence and an Open AI rival. Mostaque dismissed the idea of Stability AI being acquired. He explained that going public requires having amazing revenue, margins, and distribution. The company is only 17 months old, and the business model of Stability AI's open-source platform will be seen more clearly in the next year.

Artists outraged by artificial intelligence that copies in seconds the styles they have sacrificed years to develop are waging battle online and in court. Fury erupted in the art community last year with the release of generative artificial intelligence (AI) programs that can convincingly carry out commands such as drawing a dog like cartoonist Sarah Andersen would, or a nymph the way illustrator Karla Ortiz might do. Such style-swiping AI works are cranked out without the original artist's consent, credit or compensation--the three C's at the heart of a fight to change all that. In January, artists including Andersen and Ortiz filed a class-action lawsuit against DreamUp, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, three image-generating AI models programmed with art found online. Andersen told AFP she felt "violated" when first she saw an AI drawing that copied the style of her "Fangs" comic book work.

INan unremarkable conference room inside OpenAI's office, insulated from the mid-January rain pelting San Francisco, company president Greg Brockman surveys the "energy levels" of the team overseeing the company's new artificial intelligence model, ChatGPT. "How are we doing between'everything's on fire and everyone's burned out' to'everyone's just back from the holidays and everything's good'? What's the spectrum?" he asks. "I would say the holidays came at just the right time," replies one lieutenant. Within five days of ChatGPT's November launch, 1 million users overloaded its servers with trivia questions, poetry prompts and recipe requests. Open-AI quietly routed some of the load to its training supercomputer, thousands of interconnected graphics processing units (GPUs) custom-built with allies Microsoft and Nvidia, while long-term work on its next models, like the highly anticipated GPT-4, took a back seat. As the group huddles, ChatGPT's at-capacity servers still turn away users.

DALL-E 2 is artificial intelligence software that can turn anything you type into art, in any style. You want a portrait of a panda in the style of Renoir? Try this! Said one woman, "That is frightening and fascinating all at the same time!" I've even used it to illustrate "Sunday Morning" stories. DALL-E 2 and its rivals, like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, are available to anyone; they're inexpensive, or even free, to use.

The upheavals of recent years have posed huge challenges for established companies, but for others rapid change can mean big opportunities. Entrepreneurs are breaking ground in important new areas, from artificial intelligence to biotechnology and super-smart energy meters. Here, we look at six companies making the most of the moment. Keep an eye on Cambridge-based energy specialist Green Energy Options this year. The company, known as Geo, was founded in 2006 as a conventional smart-meter business and has quietly grown, delivering more than 8.5m devices to date. The energy crisis could see business pick up further, as households examine their usage more closely to cut costs.

Let's begin with the objective part of the story. This section is slightly technical (although not difficult), so feel free to skim through it (still worth reading if you plan to use the model). Stable Diffusion 2 is the generic name of an entire family of models that stem from a common baseline: Stable Diffusion 2.0-base (SD 2.0-base) a raw text-to-image model. The baseline model is trained on an aesthetic subset of the open dataset LAION-5B (keep this in mind, it will be important later) and generates 512x512 images. On top of SD 2.0-base, Stability.ai

When the concept artist and illustrator RJ Palmer first witnessed the fine-tuned photorealism of compositions produced by the AI image generator Dall-E 2, his feeling was one of unease. The tool, released by the AI research company OpenAI, showed a marked improvement on 2021's Dall-E, and was quickly followed by rivals such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Type in any surreal prompt, from Kermit the frog in the style of Edvard Munch, to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings feasting on a slice of watermelon, and these tools will return a startlingly accurate depiction moments later. Cosmopolitan trumpeted the world's first AI-generated magazine cover, and technology investors fell over themselves to wave in the new era of "generative AI". The image-generation capabilities have already spread to video, with the release of Google's Imagen Video and Meta's Make-A-Video.

Stability AI, the venture-backed startup behind the text-to-image AI system Stable Diffusion, is funding a wide-ranging effort to apply AI to the frontiers of biotech. Called OpenBioML, the endeavor's first projects will focus on machine learning-based approaches to DNA sequencing, protein folding and computational biochemistry. The company's founders describe OpenBioML as an "open research laboratory" -- and aims to explore the intersection of AI and biology in a setting where students, professionals and researchers can participate and collaborate, according to Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque. "OpenBioML is one of the independent research communities that Stability supports," Mostaque told TechCrunch in an email interview. "Stability looks to develop and democratize AI, and through OpenBioML, we see an opportunity to advance the state of the art in sciences, health and medicine."

Stability AI, the venture-backed startup behind the text-to-image AI system Stable Diffusion, is funding a wide-ranging effort to apply AI to the frontiers of biotech. Called OpenBioML, the endeavor's first projects will focus on machine learning-based approaches to DNA sequencing, protein folding and computational biochemistry. The company's founders describe OpenBioML as an "open research laboratory" -- and aims to explore the intersection of AI and biology in a setting where students, professionals and researchers can participate and collaborate, according to Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque. "OpenBioML is one of the independent research communities that Stability supports," Mostaque told TechCrunch in an email interview. "Stability looks to develop and democratize AI, and through OpenBioML, we see an opportunity to advance the state of the art in sciences, health and medicine."