No Priors · Friday, September 18, 2026
Stefano Ermon, co-founder and CEO of Inception, reflected on his research journey starting in 2014 at Stanford, focusing on generative models. He noted the early limitations of models, like those used for MNIST digit generation, and the shift in focus towards their utility in learning features from unlabeled data.
“I started at Stanford in 2014 as an assistant professor and I was working on, yeah, building generative models. Back then, the research area was not particularly hot, uh, you know, the the models were not quite working well. We were still like building little generative models over MNIST, then it was like, uh, big success if you could generate these grainy images of digits and, you know, it was even hard to publish papers back then on on that topic and you had to kind of like justify training a generative model as a way to learn features from unlabeled data that then could maybe help you do better at supervised learning because that was the thing that everybody cared about.”