diffusion is promising, but still an open question how much data efficient they are compared to AR. in practice, you can also train AR forever with high enough regularization, so let's see.

Yes, it could go either way of course.

Still, just for reference, here's the paper I remembered: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15857

thanks, here's another one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03276