Diffusion LLMs - The Fastest LLMs Ever Built | Stefano Ermon, cofounder of Inception Labs

Infinite Curiosity Pod with Prateek Joshi

Content provided by Prateek Joshi. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Prateek Joshi or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://podcastplayer.com/legal.

1M ago 39:09

MP3•Episode home

Stefano Ermon is the cofounder of Inception Labs and an associate professor at Stanford. Inception is developing a new type of AI models called Diffusion LLMs.
Stefano's favorite book: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Author: Italo Calvino)
(00:01) Introduction
(00:38) What are autoregressive LLMs and how do they work
(02:28) How diffusion LLMs rethink generation
(04:02) The ceiling of autoregressive LLMs: cost, latency, reliability
(06:19) Why diffusion LLMs are commercially viable now
(09:12) Parallel refinement: how diffusion models generate text
(12:05) Understanding diffusion steps and efficiency
(13:49) Hardest engineering challenges at Inception
(15:23) From research to production: the power of data
(16:24) Where diffusion LLMs still lag behind
(18:18) Evaluations and benchmarks for diffusion LLMs
(20:20) Developer experience and OpenAI-compatible API
(21:47) Economics and GPU efficiency
(23:38) Hardware and runtime stack
(24:58) Competition and the evolving diffusion LLM landscape
(27:01) Where diffusion will win first — coding and agentic systems
(30:13) How diffusion changes infra, serving, and hardware design
(33:04) What’s next at Inception: reasoning and multimodality
(35:20) Rapid Fire Round
--------
Where to find Stefano Ermon:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ermon/
--------
Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Research column: https://www.infrastartups.com
Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com
Website: https://prateekj.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-infinite
X: https://x.com/prateekvjoshi

188 episodes

#Tech #Prateek Joshi