WhoBuilt

François Chaubard

computer vision researcher

YC visiting partner and Stanford PhD student discussing diffusion and machine learning.

Key facts

Previously
Focal Systems, ran the company for a decade
Capabilities
recommends that model trainers seriously consider diffusion procedures

Career

  1. ran the company for a decade

Timeline 2

Dated events, newest first. Open the sources under any item.

How we verify
Career1Capability1
20262 events
  1. as of Jan 2026Capability
    Recommends that model trainers seriously consider diffusion procedures
    “I would seriously look at diffusion.” 25:09
    Unverified1 source· Talk
  2. as of Jan 2026Career
    François Chaubard previously at Focal Systems
    ran the company for a decade
    “After a decade running Focal Systems” 0:00
    Unverified1 source· Talk

Talks 1

27:10
The ML Technique Every Founder Should Know

François Chaubard explains diffusion as a way to learn data distributions by adding noise to examples and training a model to reverse that process. He traces key developments from early diffusion models to flow matching, which trains a model to predict a direct velocity from noise toward data, and describes how noise schedules, loss functions, and architectures affect results. The talk covers applications in image and video generation, proteins, weather, robotics, and other high-dimensional domains, while noting limits such as sensitivity to the number of inference steps. Chaubard argues that founders and researchers should consider diffusion broadly, both when training models and when building products on top of them.

Jan 22, 2026· 27 min 0:00