Ermon: Power constraints will drive diffusion models to replace frontier LLMs
Stefano Ermon · ⚡️Mercury: Ultra-Fast Diffusion LLMs — Estefano Ermon, CEO Inception Labs · Aug 4, 2025 · at 23:42
Stefano Ermon is the CEO of Inception Labs and a Stanford professor developing discrete diffusion language models.
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“If it happens, it's gonna be driven by efficiency. Like we're all constrained by essentially power. And if you have, I mean, at the end of the day, it's all an inference game, right? Okay. Training is expensive, but then the thing that matters is being able to serve these models cheaply and without consuming more energy that we have access to. And you only have so many gigawatts of Power and so many data centers, and there is a growing demand for tokens that you need to be able to serve to users and all kinds of apps that are being built. And so there is a real need to find a solution that can give us maybe a 10 X improvement on the efficiency side. And there's a really good chance that diffusion models are the thing. So if indeed it's possible to match the quality of frontier models in terms of quality, if you have a win on the inference side, that is going to be the solution that will be that will be deployed.”
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