Ivana Balazevic

Senior Research Scientist @GoogleDeepMind. Previously Gemini Diffusion, now making Gemini better at all things multimodal.

[Ivana Balazevic @ibalazevic]

🚀Meet Gemini Diffusion, our first diffusion-based and super fast language model, just announced at Google I/O!🚀

Very excited to be able to share what I've been working on for the past little while with our amazing small team @GoogleDeepMind.

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

We’ve developed Gemini Diffusion: our state-of-the-art text diffusion model.

Instead of predicting text directly, it learns to generate outputs by refining noise, step-by-step. This helps it excel at coding and math, where it can iterate over solutions quickly. #GoogleIO

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

We’re dropping Gemini Omni: our first step towards a model that can create anything from anything - starting with video.

It combines Gemini’s intelligence with our generative media systems - representing a leap forward in world understanding, multimodality, and editing 🧵

[Google @Google]

Gemini 3.1 Pro be like

[Hannah Sheahan @hannahsheahan]

If you’re starting a career in research, please consider researching mental illness. Felix fought immensely hard to recover and tried every treatment available to him. they werent enough. There are many people in similar positions now who need help that more research could bring

[Ivana Balazevic @ibalazevic]

💔

[Hannah Sheahan @hannahsheahan]

Today marks 1 year since Felix died by suicide. He was my person. It’s also exactly ten yrs since we danced in a crappy nightclub and madeout the first time. These anniversaries shouldn’t go together, but they do.

@FelixHill84 was brilliant and not ashamed of his mental illness.

[Eleni Triantafillou @Eleni30fillou]

i am looking for an intern to work on a project on unlearning undesired or unsafe behaviours from pretrained models. please reach out if you’re a good fit :) i’m at neurips till sunday and would love to chat.

[Nelly Papalampidi @pinelopip3]

Are you interested to join @GoogleDeepMind as a student researcher (PhD students)?

I am hiring for a fun project on reward modeling for world models!

If you are interested on video understanding/generation and reward models/critiquing, get in touch and apply below! 👇

[Ivana Balazevic @ibalazevic]

@LiamFedus @ekindogus @periodiclabs Really refreshing to see! I was wondering when the field was going to shift focus from making chatbots and generating pretty videos to something way more useful. Congrats and best of luck!

[Ivana Balazevic @ibalazevic]

@max_nlp Congrats and welcome! 🎉

[Karsten Roth @confusezius]

In Nashville for my last PhD conference 🥲.

Come join today 10:30-12:30 in Hall D (#391) to talk insights, tips and tricks to modify pretraining for representation reuse - scalably.

🚀Joint work w/ @zeynepakata, @dimadamen, @ibalazevic & @olivierhenaff while at @GoogleDeepMind.

[Edouard Leurent @eleurent]

Writing a STRONGLY WORDED LETTER with Gemini Diffusion and its Instant Edit tab

[Ivana Balazevic @ibalazevic]

To add to the buzz of this week, a bit more of a personal update: I’m moving to San Francisco in a few days!

Grateful for the 3.5 amazing years in London and all the wonderful friends and colleagues I’ve met here. ♥️

I’ll be staying at Google DeepMind and happy to chat about Gemini Diffusion and anything else related to AI or otherwise. Excited for this new chapter and more hikes and sunny days!!

[Ivana Balazevic @ibalazevic]

🚀Meet Gemini Diffusion, our first diffusion-based and super fast language model, just announced at Google I/O!🚀

Very excited to be able to share what I've been working on for the past little while with our amazing small team @GoogleDeepMind.

[Sander Dieleman @sedielem]

In 2022, I worked on text diffusion for a bit and wrote a blog post. Since then, people have regularly asked me about scaling diffusion LLMs.

All the while, I was on the first row watching Brendan assemble a cracked team and make it a reality. Now I can stop being coy about it😁

[Archie Sengupta @archiexzzz]

Got access to Google diffusion.

HOLY SH!T

909 tokens/s ??????

I made a calendar in 3s? 3 fcuking seconds?

[Yam Peleg @Yampeleg]

guys this is real time

[Ivana Balazevic @ibalazevic]

@migJaques @GoogleDeepMind Haha yes, even slowed down in the demo

[Ivana Balazevic @ibalazevic]

🚀Meet Gemini Diffusion, our first diffusion-based and super fast language model, just announced at Google I/O!🚀

Very excited to be able to share what I've been working on for the past little while with our amazing small team @GoogleDeepMind.

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

We’ve developed Gemini Diffusion: our state-of-the-art text diffusion model.

Instead of predicting text directly, it learns to generate outputs by refining noise, step-by-step. This helps it excel at coding and math, where it can iterate over solutions quickly. #GoogleIO

[Sander Dieleman @sedielem]

As I was saying: it's happening

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

cooking up something tasty for tomorrow...

[Explainable Machine Learning @ExplainableML]

(3/4) Context-Aware Multimodal Pretraining
By the amazing @confusezius with @zeynepakata, @dimadamen, @ibalazevic, @olivierhenaff
📖 [Paper]: https://t.co/tHSbcr5gjC

[will o’brien @Willob]

One thing I notice in SF is the blurred lines between work and play time e.g. people performative coding at bars / parties signaling “hustle”. This is extremely peasant-coded and not conducive to great work imo.

History’s elites and greats kept strict borders and took leisure very seriously. It was viewed as a strict requirement to enable great work. Leonardo painted by day and staged court masquerades by night. Churchill drafted war speeches after champagne lunches and silk‑robed baths. Greek philosophers held week‑long wine‑soaked symposia that forged politics. Steve Jobs took long, device‑free walks in the hills that seeded the iPhone.

Work ferociously, build something magical, then close the lid; feast, dance, and wander. Live at the extremes. If you can’t stay off your laptop, skip the party.