The Toronto LLM Meetup Group - dLLM: Diffusion Large Language Models

​Welcome to the 2nd session of the 4th edition of the Toronto LLM Meetup Group. We really appreciate the growing interest in our events and will continue to ensure equitable access for all participants. This time, we’ll be exploring dLLMs (Diffusion Large Language Models) — what they are, how they work, and where they might take us next.

​​Special thanks to Ada for providing the event space and Hudson Labs for their support and resources.

​📖 Papers & Resources

​​It is not necessary to read them all before the session, but browsing through them might help you more actively participate in the discussion session.

​https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09992 -> LLaDA

​https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15857 -> Diffusion beats autoregressive in data-constrained settings

​https://github.com/ML-GSAI/LLaDA -> Implementation

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​​⏱️ Timetable

​​17:30 - 18:00 Icebreaker & Networking

​​18:00 - 18:30 Speaker Session #1

​​18:30 - 18:50 Discussion

​​18:50 - 19:20 Speaker Session #2

​​19:20 - 19:40 Discussion

​​19:40 - 20:00 Networking

​​📣 Speaker Bios

​​Suhas Pai is an NLP researcher and the co-founder/CTO of Hudson Labs, a Toronto-based Y Combinator-backed startup. He authored Designing Large Language Model Applications (O’Reilly Media) and led/contributed to the development of several open-source LLMs. Suhas has chaired the Toronto Machine Learning Summit since 2021 and regularly speaks at AI conferences and seminars on NLP research.

​​Abdullah Al-Hayali is a machine learning engineer, independent consultant, and the founder of Pulp Health, an AI powered dental assistant. He developed several LLM powered applications for healthcare's administrative infrastructure and insurance, along with fundamental research in medical imaging and computer vision. Prior to Pulp, Abdullah built and exited Dice Health, an AI startup in the veterinary industry.

​​👋 About Us

​​The Toronto LLM Meetup group is founded by Suhas Pai, CTO and Co-founder of Hudson Labs, and Lily Ren, Senior PM, B2B AI at Telus. The aim of this group is to facilitate deep dives into LLM research topics, harnessing the skills of Toronto's vibrant AI ecosystem and promoting intellectual rigor. To this end, for each session we assemble a team of top Toronto AI scientists and practitioners to conduct an in-depth study of an emerging topic that is expected to go mainstream 6 months from now. The team presents their findings along with jumping-off points for future research at a meetup session, held at Toronto's top AI companies. Eventually we aim to spawn off community open-source research projects this way.

​​📧​ Mailing List

​​Thank you so much for your interest. We’re thrilled to see so many of you sign up for this event! We’ll be collecting emails to invite you to future editions of the meetup, but if you’d prefer not to be on the mailing list, just let us know.