Runway
Axel SauerCo-founder · Black Forest LabsResearcher↗PE
Researcher · Founder
Patrick Esser
Black Forest LabsCo-founder
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.
Career & education
Current role
Co-founder
Previously
Work and education history is primarily focused on AI-relevant roles and may not be comprehensive.
Citation Trend
Total citations to scholarly work, including research papers, technical reports, books and theses, as recorded by Google Scholar. Each point is a dated snapshot.
citations54,300As of Jun 15, '26
citations+17,812Since last snapshot, Aug 25, '25
Selected contributions
High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models
Made diffusion image generation more efficient by working with compressed image representations.
Based on public sources. If accuracy is important, verify details using the links or references.
For corrections, updates, or requests to remove information, contact us.
Reviewed August 24, 2026 · Checked for accuracy and new information.