by Amit Shekhar · 22 June 2026
How do Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) work?
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs), a new way to make models write text. They promise to generate words in a different way than the LLMs we use today, and that too much faster in many cases.
Read on Outcome School ↗then come back to lock it in
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What this article covers
- What is a Diffusion Language Model?
- How do today's language models write text?
- The problem with the usual approach
- Where the diffusion idea comes from
- What does "noise" mean for text?
- The two phases: forward and reverse
- How a DLM actually generates text, step by step
- A tiny end-to-end example
- A simple code-style walk-through
- DLMs vs the usual language models
- Advantages of DLMs
- Limitations of DLMs
- The current state
The article lives on outcomeschool.com. Read it there, then come back: the tutor in the margin has read it and will answer questions, and the questions below check what stayed.