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No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

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

Sep 18, 2026 · 38m

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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 models…