Mediocre in regard to the standard set by other research teams pulling $1B+ valuations. The OpenAI founding team and the recently announced team at xAI are what I would consider to be exceptionally strong groups. Adept, Anthropic, Inflection, and character.ai are also strong. Look at the track records and accolades of researchers at these groups. Ilya Sutskever alone has more research experience than the combined team of phd students Emad was working with (and eventually hired).
Wow, the AI field has barely boomed for like 1 year, and we are already all-in on credentialism?
Stable Diffusion has had a very large impact on the entire arts industry, far more people have used SD than have Claude or pi. If another open source startup can reach that level of industry shaking fame and intense user interest, they could have easily be valued at 1B.
If SDXL works out, that'll be another large leap forward. Midjourney's models are stronger, but they can't compete against a legion of 1000 fine-tunes for every purpose.
The researchers responsible for latent diffusion and VQGAN have competed directly with OpenAI for at least 2 years. They are at the top of their field.
