Mostaque's Stable Diffusion Journey

A story about Imad Mostaque, who went from hedge fund quant to creating Stable Diffusion after a personal journey with his son's autism.

"This guy was born in Jordan, has a British accent, and was a math background quant type guy working at a hedge fund. His life changed when his first kid was diagnosed with autism. He decided to take a few years off and retired early after winning at the hedge fund game.

When he went to doctors about his son's autism, they said there was no solution. Being an engineer, he didn't accept that response. He created an engine that ingested all research papers about autism and did semantic search on it, using machine learning to understand what all the research was telling us.

Later, he won a $15M X Prize for creating a system that teaches kids in foreign countries on iPads for less than $75 total cost. Then in 2020, he started thinking about COVID-19 at a dinner in Davos, seeing similarities to autism as a multi-inflammatory disease.

After getting frustrated with bureaucracy in the health organizations, he came up with what he calls his 'Promethean mission' - to open source all powerful AI and ML tools so they're not controlled by large private corporations. He brought together 20 of the best engineers, Manhattan project style, self-funded with $600,000, and created Stable Diffusion, which is now valued over a billion dollars."