Not an insider but imo the work on diffusion language models like LLaDA is really exciting. It's pretty obvious that LLMs are good but they are pretty slow. And in a world where people want agents you want a lot of the time something that might not be that smart but is capable of going really fast + searches fast. You only need to solve search in a specific domain for most agents. You don't need to solve the entire knowledge of human history in a single set of weights