
Diffusion Models vs. LLMs: How They Differ and When to Use Each
For years, generating text meant an autoregressive LLM writing one token at a time. Then in February 2026, a diffusion model called Mercury 2 started producing text several times faster than the speed-tuned models from OpenAI and Anthropic. That reopened a question enterprise teams keep getting wrong. “Diffusion model vs. LLM” sounds like a head-to-head, but the two aren’t even


