I created a billion-pound start-up business… Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos asked to meet me – here’s the secret to my success
A DAD who created a billion-pound start-up business has revealed the secret to his success.
Emad Mostaque, 40, is the founder and CEO of artificial intelligence giant Stability AI and has recently been in talks with the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
But the London dad-of-two has worked hard to get where he is today – and doesn’t plan on stopping any time soon.
Emad has gone from developing AI at home to help his autistic son, to employing 150 people across the globe for his billion-pound empire.
The 40-year-old usually calls Notting Hill home, but has started travelling to San Francisco for work.
On his most recent trip, Emad met with Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, and made a deal with Musk, the CEO of Twitter.
He says the secret to his success in the AI world is using it to help humans, not overtake them.
Emad told The Times: “I have a different approach to everyone else in this space, because I’m building narrow models to augment humans, whereas almost everyone else is trying to build an AGI [Artificial general intelligence] to pretty much replace humans and look over them.”
Emad is from Bangladesh but his parents shifted to the UK when he was a boy and settled the family in London’s Walthamstow.
The dad said he was always good at numbers in school but struggled socially as he has Asperger’s and ADHD.
The 40-year-old studied computer science and maths at Oxford, then became a hedge fund manager.
But when Emad’s son was diagnosed with autism he quit to develop something to help the youngster.
Emad recalled: “We built an AI to look at all the literature and then extract what could be the case, and then the drug repurposing.”
He says that homemade AI allowed his family create an approach that took his son to a better, more cheerful place.
And, as a result, Emad inspired himself.
He started a charity that aims to give tablets loaded with AI tutors to one billion children.
He added: “Can you imagine if every child had their own AI looking out for them, a personalised system that teaches them and learns from them?
“In 10 to 20 years, when they grow up, those kids will change the world.”
Emad also founded the billion-pound start-up Stability AI in recent years, and it’s one of the companies behind Stable Diffusion.
The tool has taken the world by storm in recent months with its ability to create images that could pass as photos from a mere text prompt.
Today, Emad is continuing to develop AI – and he says it is one of the most important inventions of history.
He explained it as “somewhere between fire and the internal combustion engine”.