We recorded a “History of Diffusion” interview series with Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Yang Song and Sander Dieleman. (The Jascha interview is out now; Yang Song and Sander are coming soon.)

While the interviews offer in-depth diffusion context directly from sources that wrote early papers on the subject, the purpose of this Notion post is to give some background context that will let you get the most out of each conversation.

Those interviews are full of surprises about the hunches, near-misses and other ups-and-downs that led to landmark diffusion research. The stories are even more interesting once you have some background knowledge about diffusion. When Yang Song says, for example, that nobody expected the reverse-time SDE to be so simple… it helps to know what he’s talking about.

For more geometric intuition and to read the full primer, head over to Notion by clicking HERE.