With so much money flooding into AI startups, it’s a good time to be an AI researcher with an idea to test out. And if the idea is novel enough, it might be easier to get the resources you need as an independent company instead of inside one of the big labs. That’s the story of Inception, a startup developing diffusion-based AI models that just raised $50 million in seed funding led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Mayfield, Innovation Endeavors, Nvidia’s NVentures, Microsoft’s M12