OpenAI's Aaron Lou on leaving a Stanford PhD for OpenAI, diffusion LMs vs autoregression
aaron_lou · x · 2026-10-27
SOTA TV episode 2 features Aaron Lou, who leads OpenAI's strategic explorations team.
- Started a Stanford PhD on geometric deep learning in 2021, pivoted to generative modeling after ChatGPT; his diffusion LM paper SEDD won the ICML 2024 Best Paper Award, and he dropped out to join OpenAI during the o1 wave.
- Chalkboard walkthrough of design trade-offs between autoregressive models with speculative decoding vs diffusion LMs, latency vs throughput (a billion ChatGPT users vs robots that can't wait), and Astra as the brain driving robot arms.
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