It is possible that the idea of highlighting this connection was emphasized for marketing purposes in order to generate interest and excitement around the development of these models.<p>When I first learned about diffusion models, I immediately drew a connection to denoise auto encoders, as both attempt to recover underlying information from noisy data.<p>However, the differences between the two models are not discussed in articles about diffusion models. From my perspective, it appears that denoise auto encoders may have played a role in inspiring the development of diffusion models.