Two more senior executives of London-based GenAI startup Stability AI are leaving the company, following the news last week that its head of audio Ed Newton-Rex resigned due to copyright concerns, Sifted has learned.
The departing employees are Jordan Valdés, who joined Stability AI this year as VP of comms, brand, creative and social media, and Joe Penna, who joined as VP of applied machine learning last year.
When contacted by Sifted, Penna said he is not leaving the company, but one company insider confirmed to Sifted he has resigned.
Sifted also reached out to Valdés and Stability for comment.
Valdés joined the company shortly after Forbes published allegations about Stability failing to pay staff on time (allegations that CEO Emad Mostaque denies) — bringing with her significant institutional comms experience from IBM and the Obama administration, according to her LinkedIn.
Penna is a filmmaker who was focused on how generative models like Stable Diffusion could be used in the creative industries.
Newton-Rex explained his resignation on Twitter last week, saying that he did not agree with Stability’s argument that training AI models on copyrighted data is protected by a legal concept known as “fair use”.
Stability losing Newton-Rex, Valdés and Penna in a short period of time marks a fresh round of setbacks for a company that has seen 10 other senior execs depart this year, including its former VP of product, former VP of engineering and former head of research. Last month, Bloomberg also reported that the company’s general counsel and head of HR had left the company.
*This article was updated on Monday 20 November 17:00 to reflect Joe Penna's response to Sifted
