Jiaming Song, the inventor of the accelerated diffusion model DDIM (Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models), confirmed via LinkedIn at the end of May 2026 that he had left Luma AI, ending his nearly three-year tenure as Chief Scientist. DDIM greatly compresses the sampling steps of diffusion models and is a key technical foundation for the commercial rollout of mainstream generative AI products such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALL·E. Song joined Luma AI in 2023 from NVIDIA, where he was a Senior Research Scientist. After that, he led the company through multiple strategic pivots — from 3D content generation to video generation, and then to multimodal AI foundation models — and participated in advancing products like the Dream Machine video generator and Uni-1.1.
Song’s next steps have not yet been disclosed, nor has he revealed whether he will start a new venture. His departure is another sign of the accelerating talent mobility in the AI field — where the moves of top researchers often foreshadow the focus of the next phase of technological competition. Luma AI has not yet publicly responded.