Stefano Ermon, Founder & CEO of Inception & Stanford Professor of Computer Science
Insights from a pioneer of diffusion models
It was a great honor to host an Icon dinner with Stefano Ermon, the co-founder and CEO of Inception. Thanks so much for sharing your insights with us, Stefano — and to Asset Abdualiyev from Silkroad Innovation Hub for hosting and CMT Digital for sponsoring the event. Takeaways below:
Stefano is one of the original inventors of diffusion — the technology behind Midjourney and Sora. While everyone else applied it to images and video, he asked: why not language?
The problem with today's LLMs is architectural. Autoregression generates text one token at a time, a key bottleneck that makes AI slow and expensive. In contrast, Inception's diffusion-based LLMs generate responses in parallel.
Mercury 2, their first model and the only commercially available dLLM, is 5-10x faster than the speed-optimized models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google while matching their accuracy. Beyond speed, it reduces GPU costs and could enable built-in error correction as well as unified multimodal processing across language, image, and code in the future.
For latency-sensitive applications, this is a step change — voice agents that feel natural, code tools that keep up with how fast developers think, and dynamic user interfaces that respond instantly. The impact is especially high in agentic workflows, which chain dozens of inference calls per task. There, cutting latency per call doesn't just save time: it changes how many steps you can afford to run, and how good the final output gets.
Two other key insights from Stefano:
The LLM market is going to be enormous. Even if diffusion captures only the latency-sensitive use cases, that's a massive business.
Google is working on diffusion too, but Inception has the world's best research talent in this specific area, a singular focus, and a startup's ability to move fast. Stefano pointed out that academic institutions run research by committee, leading to slow decisions. Inception runs like a high-conviction, tightly aligned team with a clear direction. That focus is why they've stayed consistently ahead.
Check out Inception’s career page to learn more: https://lnkd.in/ebKV5YPu.
