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

Stefano Ermon, co-founder and CEO of Inception, discusses his company's radical bet on diffusion models to overcome the hardware and latency bottlenecks of autoregressive LLMs. He explains how parallel token generation in diffusion offers superior inference scaling and GPU utilization, expanding beyond images to discrete text and code generation. Ermon shares insights into Inception’s Mercury models, real-world applications like voice agents, the custom software stack required, and why efficiency will define the next era of AI competition.