Ask HN: What Happened to dLLMs?
Diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) seemed so promising a year ago, but I don't see much about them now. What happened?
3 threads
Because they shipped and are better only for specific applications. For everything else, they lag behind frontier models. They win in latency-sensitive niches (e.g., autocomplete, code infilling, subagent calls). Not frontier-level reasoning.
dLLMs are still promising. It's a counterintuitive hardware limitation. You should watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r305-aQTaU0
They’re kinda dyslexic - like bad OCR