Transformers & Diffusion LLMs: What's the connection?

Diffusion-based LLMs are a new paradigm for text generation; they progressively refine gibberish into a coherent response. But what's their connection to Transformers? In this video, I unpack how Transformers evolved from a simple machine translation tool into the universal backbone of modern AI — powering everything from auto-regressive models like GPT to diffusion-based models like LLaDA. We’ll go step-by-step through: • How the Transformer architecture actually works (encoder, decoder, attention) • Why attention replaced recurrence in natural language processing • How GPT training differs…