Diffusion language models write text by denoising [MASK], most-confident-first — parallel, any-order, and revisable

Almost every LLM you've used — GPT, Claude, Llama — writes text the way a person types: predict the next token, append it, predict the next one from everything so far. One token per forward pass, strictly left-to-right. It's so standard that most people assume it's just what generating text means . It's a design choice, not a law. A diffusion language model (LLaDA, Mercury) makes a completely different bet: it starts from a whole sentence of [MASK] and denoises it, predicting every blank at…