Three members of Stability AI Ltd.’s research team have reportedly left the well-funded artificial intelligence startup.

Sifted and Forbes reported the development today, citing people familiar with the matter. Stability AI confirmed one of the three researchers’ departure. The news comes only a day after Inflection AI Inc., another high-profile generative AI startup, also announced significant personnel changes.

London-based Stability AI launched in 2019 and went on to raise more than $100 million from investors. The company is best known as the developer of Stable Diffusion, a popular series of open-source image generation models. The models allow users to create images with natural language prompts.

The original version of Stable Diffusion was developed by a team of five researchers at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. The three Stabile AI staffers who have reportedly left the company, Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Dominik Lorenz, were members of that team. Rombach led the group.

Stability AI has released several new iterations of Stable Diffusion since the original version became available in late 2022. The latest edition, Stable Diffusion 3, debuted this past February. It can generate higher-quality images than its predecessor and is better at understanding complex prompts.

Under the hood, Stable Diffusion 3 combines elements of two popular neural network designs: the so-called Transformer and diffusion model architectures. The Transformer architecture underpins practically all large language models. Diffusion models, meanwhile, are neural networks that learn how to draw by studying image files into which researchers deliberately introduce errors.

Shortly after releasing Stable Diffusion 3 in February, Stability AI debuted a second new AI model. Stable Video 3D, as the model is called, is capable of generating brief clips based on an image provided by the user.

The company has managed to develop multiple new AI algorithms despite losing several engineering executives over the past year. Those executives reportedly included a chief technology officer, as well as vice presidents responsible for research and development, engineering and applied machine learning. Other key employees, including Stability AI’s general counsel, have also left in recent months.

According to Forbes, internal documents suggest the company’s expenses significantly exceed its revenue. Bloomberg reported in November that Stability AI was spending $8 million a month to support its business operations.

Today’s reports about the researcher resignations at the company come shortly after Inflection AI, a well-funded language model developer, also announced personnel changes. On Tuesday, it revealed that founding Chief Executive Officer Mustafa Suleyman is joining Microsoft Corp. to lead its consumer AI group. Co-founder Karén Simonyan will also move to the tech giant along with most of Inflection AI’s other employees.

The AI developer plans to continue operating under the leadership of a new CEO, former Mozilla Foundation executive Sean White. Inflection AI will refocus on developing custom generative AI models for enterprises. Additionally, it plans to make its recently introduced Inflection-2.5 LLM available through Azure and other cloud platforms. 

Image: Stability AI