This Stanford professor just raised a $50M Seed and have built a 10x faster and 10x cheaper AI coding model with the performance of Gemini Flash / Haiku. Inception Labs’ Mercury model can implement games like Connect 4 from scratch in ~2s. The speed feels magical, like going from dial up to broadband. And it’s purely achieved by the novel use of diffusion models for code, that Stefano and two PhD student turned professor cofounders invented years ago. Maybe there’s a world where we don’t need billions in compute when you can run quality models cheaper ($0.25/M input, $1/M output tokens). The next step is to get them to be at frontier quality. A small testament to just how incredible this team is the long list of incredible startups have already come out of Stefano’s lab: founders and key members of SSI, Pika, Luma, Together, Harmonic, Wispr, Liquid, Radical Numerics and many more! AI veterans Andrew Ng and senpai Andrej Karpathy are also investing alongside us as well as Nvidia, Microsoft, Databricks and Snowflake. Read more technical details here: