Runway
Robin RombachResearcher
Black Forest Labs
Co-founder
via Black Forest Labs
Researcher · Founder
Patrick Esser
PE
Co-founder at Black Forest Labs
Esser helped create the technology behind Stable Diffusion, making high-quality image generation far cheaper to run. He also co-created VQGAN, which showed how detailed images could be represented compactly and generated with modern language-model techniques.
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Background
Current role
Co-founderBlack Forest Labs
Black Forest LabsPreviously
About this data
Work and education history is primarily focused on AI-relevant roles and may not be comprehensive.
Last editorial review: August 24, 2026Citation Trend
2 snapshots54,300citations as of Jun 15, '26+17,812 since Aug 25, '25
For today’s citation count and citations per paper, visit Google Scholar.