When Prem Akkaraju took over as Stability AI’s chief executive in June 2024, he inherited a business in turmoil. The UK-based company behind Stable Diffusion, the popular open source image-generating AI model, was in debt, had just lost its co-founder and CEO Emad Mostaque, and was fighting a series of lawsuits over whether it breached copyright law by scraping the internet for images.
On his appointment Akkaraju joined a group of prominent investors, including Coatue Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Napster founder and former president of Facebook Sean Parker and former Google CEO Eric Schmid, to inject fresh funds into the company. He came from the film industry, where he led Wētā FX, an Oscar-winning visual effects studio behind films such as Avatar and the Lord of the Rings. He also has an executive producer credit for the 2021 Oscar-nominated film The White Tiger.
In this conversation with the Financial Times’ AI correspondent Melissa Heikkilä, he explains how his company approaches data and copyright, and how he sees the AI sector working together with the creative industries and artists instead of against them.