Remember how Midjourney and Sora blew your mind? Inception Labs brings that same “wow” factor to text and code with diffusion models. I’m proud to announce Mayfield led the investment in Inception Labs last July, creators of Mercury – the first commercial-scale diffusion LLM that runs 10x faster and at 1/10th the cost of traditional LLMs.
The founding team represents the perfect storm of talent: Stanford University professor Stefano Ermon who co-invented diffusion models, UCLA professor Aditya Grover, and Cornell University professor Volodymyr Kuleshov. After working together for over 10 years on AI research, they’ve embarked on the ambitious mission to rebuild the AI tech stack from the ground up fundamentally.
Personally, partnering with Inception Labs feels like a homecoming. It brings me back to my Stanford days when my PhD research in video compression led to my first startup, VXtreme (acquired by Microsoft), the pioneer in video streaming. I’m witnessing the same pattern unfold again but with significantly higher stakes. AI represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how we work, live, and play.
As I see it, Inception Labs’ technology is an enabling layer that will propel Collaborative Intelligence to new heights. Their approach mirrors human thought processes more closely than traditional left-to-right text generation, resulting in faster, more accurate, real-time language generation with fewer hallucinations.
This breakthrough has the potential to democratize AI. With lower costs and reduced computing requirements, Mercury can bring powerful language models to the edge, even to the palm of your hand. The possibilities are truly endless.
