Codestral 22B vs Gemini Diffusion

Codestral 22B

Mistral AI

Codestral is a 22-billion-parameter code-specialized model from Mistral AI, released in May 2024 as the company's first dedicated coding model, trained with focus on fill-in-the-middle (FIM) completion, code generation, and repair across 80+ programming languages. Unlike Mistral's general-purpose Apache 2.0 models, Codestral was released under a separate non-production research license, reflecting its positioning as a professional coding tool requiring commercial API access for production deployment. Its FIM support made it particularly valued for IDE integrations and code completion tools that need to insert code within existing contexts rather than only appending to the end.

Gemini Diffusion

Google DeepMind

Gemini Diffusion is an experimental text and code generation model from Google DeepMind, announced at Google I/O in May 2025 as the first diffusion-based language model to achieve quality comparable to autoregressive models on standard benchmarks. Unlike transformer-based models that predict tokens sequentially left-to-right, it generates entire blocks of text by iteratively refining noise — the paradigm used in image and video generation models — enabling faster sampling speeds and stronger mid-generation error correction for code and mathematical editing tasks. At announcement it was available only as an experimental demo via waitlist, with no public API, marking it as a research milestone rather than a production deployment.