No Priors · Friday, September 18, 2026
Stefano Ermon founded Inception to scale up diffusion model technology for commercial language models. He believes diffusion models offer a competitive advantage due to their efficiency at inference time, contrasting them with the sequential nature of autoregressive models.
“And so I started inception, uh, company to basically scale up the technology and then try to build, uh, commercial scale diffusion-based language models.”
“Uh, at inception, we're betting on diffusion models because we believe that what matters eventually will be inference time scaling. And there are fundamental reasons for why diffusion models are better than autoregressive models at inference time.”