Why Didn't Inception Open Source Its Diffusion Models?
Stefano Ermon says Inception did not open source everything in part to keep the IP a little closer to the company. Diffusion is a different stack, and a lot of it had to be built in-house because there is no mature ecosystem for the serving engine or the kernels.
Much of the work had to be developed inside the company. Some open source models exist, but they are not particularly good, so the models are a little harder to deploy and customers are not used to trying them. Inception has to build its own stack for SFT, for RLHF, and for RL, and the stack becomes IP to some extent. One reason for keeping it closed was to hold that IP closer and not open it.
The closed choice has downsides. The community has less chance to contribute, adoption is harder, and on-prem deployments are hard. There are pros and cons with both choices.
Why Diffusion Will Win AI Inference with Inception Co-Founder and CEO Stefano Ermon ·