Ethan Smith
Lead AI Researcher at Canva
Gainesville, Florida
Joined January 2026
Summary
AI researcher and technical leader who co-founded Leonardo.AI and led foundational model work before joining Canva; his career shows a trajectory from hands-on research to research leadership in product-focused organizations. tracxn+2
Places strong emphasis on dataset curation, aesthetic judgment, and 'taste' in generative image model development, advocating a hybrid approach that pairs rigorous engineering with curatorial human judgment. leonardo+1
Active contributor to open research and tools for image generative models, publishing code and project write-ups (e.g., ImprovedTokenMerge) and sharing technical essays that connect probabilistic perspectives to practical model work. github+2
Background in neuroscience/psychology and applied patient-care work, suggesting an interdisciplinary perspective that connects neurobiology, mental-health experience, and machine learning thinking. rocketreach+1
Work
Education
Projects
Writing
How I Like to Think About Diffusion
January 1, 2025A long-form essay exploring intuition behind diffusion models, variance-preserving vs variance-exploding perspectives, Tweedie's formula, and related repository work (Boneless Flow) tying probabilistic views to generative modeling.
ToDo: Token Downsampling for Efficient Generation of High-Resolution Images
January 1, 2024Research write-up (and accompanying code) describing token downsampling as an alternative to token merging to achieve faster inference for high-resolution image generation; cited with an arXiv eprint identifier in the project materials.