Why there isn't any top LLM providers investing on diffusion LLM?

Reddit r/singularity News
diffusion-llm llm-providers ai-investment model-architecture industry-trends generative-ai

Summary

This article questions why major LLM providers are not investing in Diffusion LLMs despite recent advancements like Mercury 2. It explores potential fundamental issues or hardware bottlenecks hindering broader adoption.

A year ago, I would’ve said Diffusion LLMs were an interesting idea but still far from practical. They’re still pretty rough, but Mercury 2 now makes it seem like they might finally be getting close to usable. That said, aside from Meta, Ant, and Inception/Mercury, it doesn’t seem like many labs are seriously investing in them — especially the major ones like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, or even architecture-focused teams like DeepSeek and Kimi. I’m not very familiar with DLLMs, so I’m curious: why is that? Are there still fundamental issues with the paradigm that make them unlikely to become even second-tier models? Or is current hardware stack a bottleneck for DLLMs training/inference? Or are other labs just working on it quietly and not there yet?
Original Article

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