ai-research
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Survicate and UserVoice Split How Companies Hear Customers
Two feedback platforms, born five years and one continent apart, bet on opposite answers to the same question: what do users actually want? One counts votes, the other reads the room.
Inception
Inception builds diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) that generate text in parallel instead of one token at a time. Its flagship Mercury family is positioned as the first commercial-scale diffusion LLM, reporting 5–10x faster throughput than traditional autoregressive models at competitive quality, with Mercury Coder targeting code generation and Mercury 2 reasoning workloads.
Jonathan Widawski
Jonathan Widawski (known as Jo) is the co-founder and CEO of Maze, a continuous product discovery platform that lets teams run user research at the speed of product development. A veteran product designer and former UX instructor who worked with McKinsey, Rocket Internet, and PSG, he launched Maze in 2018 after experiencing firsthand how impossible it was for product teams to get reliable user data fast enough to matter. Under his leadership, Maze grew 6x during the pandemic, expanded to 60,000+ brands across 35 countries, and raised $60M total — including a $40M Series B in 2022 led by Felicis Ventures.
Cameron R. Wolfe
Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist at Netflix's Globalization team and the author of Deep (Learning) Focus, a twice-weekly Substack newsletter with 60,000+ subscribers that translates cutting-edge ML research into approachable long-form essays. A Rice University computer science PhD, he has built a reputation as one of the clearest explainers of large language models, RLHF, and AI agents in the field, bridging academia and industry with methodical depth and intellectual generosity.
Sebastian Raschka
Sebastian Raschka is a German-born AI/ML researcher, educator, and author who has built one of the most trusted independent voices in the machine learning community. Through his Substack newsletter 'Ahead of AI' (184,000+ subscribers), bestselling books like 'Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)', and 91,000+ starred GitHub repositories, he demystifies cutting-edge AI for practitioners worldwide. After a stint as an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison and a role as Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI, he now runs RAIR Lab as an independent researcher, writer, and consultant.