Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

QuHarrison Terry presents Jascha Sohl-Dickstein with the WTF Innovators Award for inventing diffusion models and his continued contributions to the field of machine learning.

The WTF Innovators Award recognizes excellence at the precipice of societal change, with the inaugural class focusing on AI innovators. As a memento, each of the 34 awardees are gifted a featured song by QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji. We present “Forefather”, produced by Nimso, to Jascha Sohl-Dickstein.

Jascha Sohl-Dickstein is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google Brain (now Google DeepMind), where he leads a research team spanning machine learning, physics, and neuroscience. His team focuses on forging new abilities of large language models, improving the accuracy of neural networks through learned optimizer algorithms, and studying the overparameterization of neural networks.

Jascha’s 2015 research paper titled “Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics” introduced the idea of diffusion models in machine learning.

Diffusion models have become an essential component in advancing computer vision neural networks. Much of the AI advances in image generation, image denoising, inpainting, and super-resolution image enhancing can be attributed to Jascha’s foundational discovery in 2015.

DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and the countless applications for image enhancing, denoising, and generation likely wouldn’t exist without diffusion models. Jascha and his colleagues built the foundation on which AI imaging is flourishing today. Jascha is at the core of past, present and future research of AI, which is why he should be on everyone’s radar. – QuHarrison Terry.

Before becoming a research scientist at Google, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein was a research associate for Mars Exploration Rovers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a visiting scholar in applied physics in Surya Ganguli's lab at Stanford University, and an academic resident at Khan Academy.