Text diffusion: A new paradigm for LLMs

Text diffusion is a new paradigm for LLMs. As opposed to mainstream auto-regressive models like GPT, Claude or Gemini (which predict one token at a time), diffusion-based LLMs draft an entire response and refine it progressively. This leads to 10x faster inference. Models like Gemini Diffusion, Mercury Coder from Inception Labs and Seed Diffusion from ByteDance are already competitive on coding benchmarks. Inspired by physical diffusion, such models make use of Markov chains to model data generation as a particle hopping through discrete states. We'll walk through the D3PM and LLaDA papers a…