Why Diffusion Will Win AI Inference with Inception Co-Founder and CEO Stefano Ermon
No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Why Diffusion Will Win AI Inference with Inception Co-Founder and CEO Stefano Ermon

B2Upper-intermediateSeptember 18, 202638 min
  • Interview
  • Technology

As generative AI hits hardware and latency bottlenecks, Stanford professor, diffusion pioneer, and Inception co-founder and CEO Stefano Ermon is betting on a radical new architecture. Stefano joins Sarah Guo to talk about Inception, and how his team is applying diffusion architecture beyond images and video into discrete text and code generation. Stefano explains the limitations of autoregressive LLMs, as well as why parallel token generation in diffusion models offers superior inference scaling and hardware utilization on standard GPUs. He also shares details about Inception’s Mercury models, real-world voice agent applications, the software stack required to serve diffusion-based mo...

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broad body of work around generative modeling, but is especially well known as one of the

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and efficiency are going to be the name of the game in AI over the next few years.

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0:00

Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Stefano Ermon, who is a longtime Stanford professor and now co-founder and CEO of Inception. Stefano has an extraordinarily broad body of work around generative modeling, but is especially well known as one of the fathers of diffusion. We talk about his company challenging the large labs and why speed

0:28

and efficiency are going to be the name of the game in AI over the next few years. Welcome Stefano. Stefano, thanks so much for being here. Great to be here.

0:36

I would love for us to just start with a little bit of your research background and how you ended up starting your company. For sure, yeah. I've been doing research in generative models for like basically my entire career.

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