Stefano Ermon

Stefano Ermon is the CEO and co-founder of Inception Labs, the company behind Mercury - the world's first commercial-scale diffusion LLM. An Italian-born Stanford associate professor on leave, Ermon co-invented DDIM (the speedup trick powering modern image generation), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO, the alignment technique used to fine-tune today's leading LLMs), and the SEDD discrete diffusion framework that won ICML 2024's Best Paper Award. At Inception, he's betting that diffusion - not autoregression - is the architecture that will define the next generation of AI, with Mercury 2 clocking 1,000+ tokens per second at a fraction of the cost of GPT or Claude.