Tiny Diffusion – A character-level text diffusion model from scratch
I previously posted this a month and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876742 I have rewritten it to be much more simple, from 951 lines of code to just 364, with no loss in core functionality or generation quality. I also added a tiny GPT implementation as a comparison (inspired by Andrej Karpathy's code). The two model implementations are ~80% identical, with the core differences being the generate and get_batch functions. The model architecture, training loop, etc, differ in only 19 lines of code. Trained weights are included, so you can just clone and run…
Tiny Diffusion – A character-level text diffusion model from scratch launched on November 10, 2025 with 172 votes, #163 of 9,796 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Tiny Diffusion is a character-level text generation model using diffusion techniques, built on a modified GPT architecture and trained on the Tiny Shakespeare dataset. At 10.7 million parameters, it is small enough to run locally on most systems. The model is designed for developers and researchers interested in exploring how diffusion models can generate text at the character level, available as open-source code on GitHub.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A character-level language diffusion model trained on Tiny Shakespeare - nathanrs/tiny-diffusion
In the maker’s words, at launch
This is a character-level language diffusion model for text generation. The model is a modified version of Nanochat's GPT implementation and is trained on Tiny Shakespeare! It is only 10.7 million parameters, so you can try it out locally.
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