BERT is just a single text diffusion step

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.

> 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

Autoregressive LLMs don't do that either actually. Sure with one forward pass you only get one token at a time, but looking at what is happening in the latent space there are clear signs of long term planning and reasoning that go beyond just the next token.

So I don't think it's necessarily more or less similar to us than diffusion, we do say one word at a time sequentially, even if we have the bigger picture in mind.

That is precisely what autoregressive means. Perhaps you meant to write that modern LLMs are not strictly autoregressive?

I think they are distinguishing the mechanical process of generation from the way the idea exists. It’s the same as how a person can literally only speak one word at a time but the ideas might be nonlinear.