[AINews] LLaDA: Large Language Diffusion Models • Buttondown
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LLaDA: Large Language Diffusion Models
Ahead of the expected Grok 3 release late tonight on a US holiday, today was a notable day with small things but we choose to award today's title story to LLaDA: Large Language Diffusion Models, the first text diffusion model scaled up to be competitive with autoregressive models like Llama 3 8B.

This is a "white whale" alternative LLM architecture that has only been speculated about but never successfully scaled up until now. The main trick is adapting diffusion to predict uniformly masked tokens, producing text in a diffusion process:

Table of Contents
AI Model & Research Releases
Benchmarks & Performance
Tools & Libraries
China & DeepSeek Focus
Perplexity Deep Research & Usage
AI & Society, Ethics, and Future
Humor/Memes
Themes:
Theme 1. Zonos: Open Weight Voice Cloning Model

Theme 2. OpenArc Python API Enhances Intel Inference
Theme 3. DeepSeek-R1: MoE Model CPU Performances
Subreddits: /r/Singularity, /r/Oobabooga, /r/MachineLearning, /r/OpenAI, /r/ClaudeAI, /r/StableDiffusion, /r/ChatGPT, /r/ChatGPTCoding
Themes:
Theme 1. Nvidia GPUs: Compute Doubling in 10 Months Raises Questions
Theme 2. Advances in Video-to-Video AI: Hunyuan's Harry Potter Anime
Theme 3. Open-Source Video Model Step-Video-T2V: High Demand, High Innovation
Theme 4. AI Agent Apply Hero: Mass Job Applications and its Impact
Theme 5. AI Image Restoration: Upscaling the Windows XP Bliss Wallpaper
A summary of Summaries of Summaries by Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking:
Theme 1. Grok 3 Ignites AI Debate: Musk's Claims Meet Community Skepticism

Theme 2. DeepSeek Models Drive Performance and Ethical Discussions
Theme 3. Llama 3.2 Challenges VRAM Limits and Sparks Quantization Solutions
Theme 4. RAG vs Fine-tuning Debate Intensifies: Efficiency and Application Focus Emerge
Theme 5. Community-Driven Tooling and Optimization Efforts Advance AI Development
The Gorilla LLM (Berkeley Function Calling) Discord and the AI21 Labs (Jamba) Discord have no new messages. Unsloth Hiring Challenges, Learning Resources for AI, Fine-tuning Models, Model Uploads on Hugging Face, Personal Experiences in Tech, and more topics were discussed.
Various other topics, discussions, and links were mentioned covering a wide range of areas in the AI field, showcasing the diversity and depth of ongoing conversations and developments in the industry.




















