By early 2024, Stability AI — the British startup that released Stable Diffusion and was once valued at $1 billion — was in financial chaos. Founder Emad Mostaque resigned in March 2024 amid reports the company had been unable to pay cloud computing bills and was behind on payroll. Multiple senior researchers had quit. The company that had democratized AI image generation with an open-source model had burned through its funding and was scrambling to find a buyer or new investment to survive.