I still feel like the best uses of models we've seen to date is for brand new code and quick prototyping. I'm less convinced of the strength of their capabilities for improving on large preexisting content over which someone has repeatedly iterated.
Part of that is because, by definition, models cannot know what is not in a codebase and there is meaningful signal in that negative space. Encoding what isn't there seems like a hard problem, so even as models get smarter, they will continue to be handicapped by that lack of institutional knowledge, so to speak.
Imagine giving a large codebase to an incredibly talented developer and asking them to zero-shot a particular problem in one go, with only moments to read it and no opportunity to ask questions. More often than not, a less talented developer who is very familiar with that codebase will be able to add more value with the same amount of effort when tackling that same problem.
Over time, I models will add more memory and institutional knowledge capture rather than starting from a blank slate each time.
That said, a negative prompt like we have in stable diffusion would still be very cool.
Instant edits feature can surgically perform text edits fast without all the extra fluff or unsolicited enhancements.
I copied shadertoys, asked it to rename all variables to be more descriptive and pasted the result to see it still working. I'm impressed.
This is because it can edit and doesn’t suffer from early token bias.
> Gemini Diffusion’s external benchmark performance is comparable to much larger models, whilst also being faster.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they scale as well as autoregressive models.
With the diffusion transformer and newer architectures, it might be possible that transformers can now be applied to diffusion. Diffusion also has the benefit of being able to "think" with the amount of diffusion steps instead of having to output tokens and then reasoning about them.
I think it's hard to tell exactly where we are headed but it's an interesting research direction especially now that it's somewhat more validated by Google.
# d1: Scaling Reasoning in Diffusion Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning
# Beyond Autoregression: Discrete Diffusion for Complex Reasoning and Planning
Could you please clarify that?
Earlier image diffusion models used U-nets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Net
I’m a bit confused by this statement. Autoregresive LLMs also process the entire input “at once” otherwise tricks like speculative decoding wouldn’t work. Can you clarify what you mean by this?
Versus one step per token, where autoregressive models only attend to previous tokens.
My only worry is that the diffusion objective will be worse than AR in terms of model capabilities, if that's the case hopefully multi-token AR models will perform as well as diffusion, or we can use this as a draft model for speculative decoding.
Now I live in California and I still can't believe I get to see them here. They're absurd - they don't look like they should be able to fly at all. They're also incredibly pretty, especially in their breeding plumage.
I live in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco, which turns out to be home to the second largest mega-roost of the California Brown Pelican (my favourite kind of pelican) in the world.
We've even rescued two of them (injured birds, we got them in a carrier and took them to the animal rescue place).
They make for a fun theme for all sorts of different AI experiments.
They're also very photogenic - I had a bunch of photos I've taken on my PyCon poster recently (you have to zoom in quite a bit to see them though): https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/poster-full-siz...
No need to go as far as California for penguins!
https://www.royalparks.org.uk/visit/parks/st-jamess-park/pel...
When executing any of them on GPUs or other accelerators though (dLLMs or otherwise), you do have to remain cognizant of chip-specific approximations and deviations from the standard. That can be actual issues on the chip (a famous one comes to mind where some f16 or f32 computation passed through an intermediate, undocumented f8), or it can be issues with how your software compiles to a chip (e.g., (a+b+c)+(x+y+z) is not the same as (a+b)+(c+x)+(y+z) with floats, so you have a lot less freedom to lay out your computations in a way that fits the chip nicely).
Cerebras and Groq are amazing, but the fact that they use custom hardware really limits the ability to finetune or scale. The other route would be an MoE that has barely 0.5b parameters active, but that would be a major undertaking that we can't prioritize at the moment.
--- If anyone at Google/Deepmind reads this, please give us API access.
We are building generative sandbox games. First title is a monster trainer where you get to actually command your creature in realtime, here is an early prototype: https://youtu.be/BOwpLyj2Yqw
Diffusion brings different set of trade offs, and as you can see it improves speed but I would expect it increases compute required for generation. But this is hard to say for sure without knowing their exact sampling process.
Interestingly we have opposite direction in case with gpt-4o, OpenAI made autoregressive image generation model and it seems it works great.
One application I envision for this kind of sampler, leveraging the diffusion model's capabilities, would be to detect and potentially correct instances of post-hoc reasoning within the buffer. The diffusion model could then help ensure that proper causal reasoning chains are established in that segment before the autoregressive model continues generating. You could also allow for slight, controlled backtracking or revision within that buffer window if the generation starts to go off-track, again using the diffusion model to smooth or adjust the text before committing it and moving forward.
Most folks I have seen experimenting with AI are either using a paid service or running high-grade hardware (even if consumer-level). The best I have in my current repertoire is a 5700XT and am not able to upgrade from that yet. The limitation, though, has at least also given some more significant insights into the shortcomings of current models.
Model sizes have gotten quite large and coherence seems to mostly have scaled with the density of a model, leaving the smaller models useful for only smaller tasks. Context size is also extremely important from my experiments with long-running dialogues and agent sessions, but a smaller GPU simply cannot fit a decent model and enough context at the same time. I do wonder if diffusion techniques will allow for a rebalancing of this density-to-coherence connection, letting smaller models produce chunks of coherent text even if limited by context. From my viewpoint it seems it will. Mixed tool call + response outputs also have the potential to be better.
Speed is also another problem I, and everyone else, has had with modern LLMs. The nature of cycling around the input with a new additional output each time is time consuming. On an older GPU with no AI-specific hardware it is an eternity! Being able to at least track 0-100% progress state would be an improvement from the current solution. At the moment one must simply wait for the LLM to decide to stop (or hit the max number of inference tokens). I am hopeful that, even on lower-end GPUs, a diffusion model will perform slightly better.
This does now beg several questions. If we are processing noise, where does the noise come from? Is there a good source of noise for LLMs/text specifically? Is the entire block sized beforehand or is it possible to have variable length in responses?
Diffusion models for code generation are a big deal. If they are using transformers this would likely fall into the DiT bucket (diffusion transformers). I had previously worked on use cases that leveraged U-Net diffusion several years ago and there was quite a bit of interest in hybrid models. I expect to see further leaps in the diffusion space in the near future.
transformi•3h ago
randomgoogler1•2h ago
My understanding of Groq is that the reason it is fast is that all the weights are kept in SRAM and since the SRAM <-> Compute bandwidth is much faster than HBM <-> Compute bandwidth, you can generate tokens faster (During generation the main bottleneck is just bringing in the weights + KV caches into compute).
If the diffusion models just do multiple unmasked forward passes through a transformer, then the activation * weights computation + (attention computation) will be the bottleneck which will make each denoising step compute bound and there won't be any advantage in storing the weights in SRAM since you can overlap the HBM -> compute transfer with compute itself.
But my knowledge of diffusion is non-existent, so take this with a truck of salt.