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BERT is just a single text diffusion step

(nathan.rs)
454 points nathan-barry | 1 comments | 20 Oct 25 14:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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kibwen ◴[20 Oct 25 15:52 UTC] No.45645307[source]▶
To me, the diffusion-based approach "feels" more akin to whats going on in an animal brain than the token-at-a-time approach of the in-vogue LLMs. Speaking for myself, I don't generate words one a time based on previously spoken words; I start by having some fuzzy idea in my head and the challenge is in serializing it into language coherently.
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1. naasking ◴[20 Oct 25 20:02 UTC] No.45648578[source]▶
> Speaking for myself, I don't generate words one a time based on previously spoken words

This is a common but fundamentally a weird assumption people have about neurology where they think that what they consciously perceive has some bearing on what's actually happening at the operational or physical level.