Chenlin Meng
Chenlin Meng is an artificial intelligence researcher and the co-founder and Chief Scientist of the AI video generation company PikaPikaPika develops AI creative tools for generating and editing video, images and audio. Its platform combines proprietary and third-party models, creative apps and developer interfaces for individuals and professional teams.Open the full entry. At Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry she worked on diffusion models, co-authoring the DDIM paper and serving as first author of SDEdit.
Contents12 sections
Key facts
2016–2020Mathematics at Stanford
From September 2016 to June 2020 Chenlin Meng studied mathematics at Stanford University, earning a B.S. with distinction.[1]
As an undergraduate she published five generative AI papers with Stefano Ermon.[2]
2018Rendering Competition Grand Prize
In 2018, “Cotton Candy,” an entry she made with Hubert Teo and Jiren Zhu, won the Grand Prize in the rendering competition of Stanford’s CS348B course.[3]
From 2020: Computer Science Ph.D. Studies
In September 2020 she began a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford, advised by Stefano Ermon; her homepage lists the program as “Sep. 2020 - Now.”[4]
October 2020The DDIM Paper
On October 6, 2020, “Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models” (DDIM), which she co-authored as second author with Jiaming Song and Stefano Ermon, was submitted to arXiv.[5]
2021–2022SDEdit
On August 2, 2021, the paper SDEdit (Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations), with her as first author alongside Yutong He, Yang Song, Jiaming Song, Jiajun Wu, Jun-Yan Zhu and Stefano Ermon, was submitted to arXiv.[6]
The paper was published at ICLR 2022; the authors state that SDEdit has been applied to text-guided image editing in Stable Diffusion’s img2img, GLIDE and distilled-SD.[7]
2022Graduate Awards
Her homepage lists two honors she received in 2022: the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship and the Cadence Women in Technology Scholarship.[1]
2022–2023Distilling Guided Diffusion Models
On October 6, 2022, she submitted “On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models” as first author with a Stanford University affiliation; her co-authors were Robin Rombach, Ruiqi Gao, Diederik P. Kingma, Stefano Ermon, Jonathan Ho and Tim Salimans, from Stability AI, LMU Munich and Google Research’s Brain Team.[8]
Her homepage annotates the paper as “CVPR 2023, Award candidate.”[4]
2023Founding Pika
She co-founded the AI video company with Demi GuoDemi GuoDemi Guo is the co-founder and chief executive of Pika, a company that makes AI tools for creating video. A Harvard graduate, she worked in Meta’s AI research division and pursued a PhD at Stanford before co-founding Pika with Chenlin Meng in 2023.Open the full entry; both were formerly Ph.D. students in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab.[9]
September–October 2026: Pika Relaunch and ChatGPT Plugin
On September 17, 2026, Pika relaunched as a unified AI creative platform for video, image and sound with more than 25 apps, writing in its announcement that “AI creative tools haven’t been built to serve actual Creatives.”[10]
On October 16, 2026, Pika announced a ChatGPT plugin, saying it had worked with OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry to bring its creative tools into ChatGPT.[11]
Career: Pika, Google Brain and Stability AI
She is Pika’s Chief Scientist and a co-founder, with Demi Guo as CEO; the company’s profile says she “co-authored DDIM, a key diffusion breakthrough.”[12]
Before Pika, she worked at Google BrainGoogle BrainGoogle Brain was Google’s AI research team, co-founded by Jeff Dean and others in 2011. It open-sourced the TensorFlow machine learning system in 2015 and was merged with DeepMind into Google DeepMind in April 2023.Open the full entry and Stability AI.[2]
Interests: Art and 3D Animation
On her personal homepage she describes herself: “I am a fan of arts and 3D animation.”[4]
Sources
- Chenlin Meng's Homepage (opens in a new window)
- Pika’s Imagination Engine (opens in a new window)
- CS348b 2018 Rendering Competition (opens in a new window)
- Chenlin Meng's Homepage (opens in a new window)
- Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (opens in a new window)
- SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations (opens in a new window)
- SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations (opens in a new window)
- On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models (opens in a new window)
- Pika, which is building AI tools to generate and edit videos, raises $55M (opens in a new window)
- Welcome to the New Pika (opens in a new window)
- Pika Is Now Inside ChatGPT (opens in a new window)
- Careers — Pika (opens in a new window)