[Linkpost] “Gemini Diffusion: watch this space” by Yair Halberstadt

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

This is a link post. Google Deepmind has announced Gemini Diffusion. Though buried under a host of other IO announcements it's possible that this is actually the most important one!
This is significant because diffusion models are entirely different to LLMs. Instead of predicting the next token, they iteratively denoise all the output tokens until it produces a coherent result. This is similar to how image diffusion models work.
I've tried they results and they are surprisingly good! It's incredibly fast, averaging nearly 1000 tokens a second. And it one shotted my Google interview question, giving a perfect response in 2 seconds (though it struggled a bit on the followups).
It's nowhere near as good as Gemini 2.5 pro, but it knocks ChatGPT 3 out the water. If we'd seen this 3 years ago we'd have been mind blown.
Now this is wild for two reasons:

1. We now have [...]

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First published:
May 20th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MZvtRqWnwokTub9sH/gemini-diffusion-watch-this-space
Linkpost URL:
https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-diffusion/
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.