Opinion: Masked Language Modeling Was a Detour, Autoregressive Was Inevitable

jxmnop · x · 2026-08-04

An AI researcher argued that in the history of model architectures, Masked Language Modeling (MLM, used by models like BERT) was somewhat silly by construction. They believe that in most alternate universes, the field would have skipped this stage entirely and gone straight to the autoregressive approach that dominates today.

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