Ermon: Diffusion LLMs Can Reuse Standard Architectures and Datasets
Stefano Ermon · ⚡️Mercury: Ultra-Fast Diffusion LLMs — Estefano Ermon, CEO Inception Labs · Aug 4, 2025 · at 8:49
Stefano Ermon, CEO of Inception Labs, discusses which components of the existing autoregressive LLM ecosystem transfer directly to diffusion language models.
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“Well, you can use architectures. I think that at least the shapes you, that, that can be leveraged. So you don't have to reinvent and necessarily completely different neural network architectures can, a lot of the data can be used. Like I think perhaps there are optimizations and you can think about what kind of datasets work best for diffusion models, but it's pretty much compatible in terms of like the types of data that you would need to do pre-training, mid-training, post-training. It's all quite compatible, but you have to change. You have to innovate on the training losses, on the objectives”
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