1. Startup Inception, led by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, has raised $50 million in seed funding for its new venture focused on diffusion-based AI models. The funds come from notable investors such as Menlo Ventures and Andrew Ng.

2. Inception has released a new version of their Mercury model, designed for software development, which is already being integrated into tools like ProxyAI, Buildglare, and Kilo Code. The startup claims that the diffusion approach will help conserve on latency (response time) and compute cost.

3. Ermon asserts that Inception's diffusion-based LLMs are faster and more efficient than current models due to their ability to process many operations simultaneously, making them particularly advantageous for handling large quantities of text or managing data constraints in software development.