LLM — A large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
pretraining — The first, biggest phase of building a model: training it on enormous amounts of text so it learns language, facts, and reasoning in general.
Why it matters
Diffusion decoding gives VLMs a tunable speed/quality dial, and adapting an existing autoregressive model avoids the ~16x training compute that diffusion language modeling normally demands.
