Neural networks that learn the probability of patterns in their data, introduced by Geoffrey Hinton and Terry Sejnowski in the mid-1980s. They were early generative models.
With Boltzmann machines, you spend quite a lot of time struggling to get them to produce recognizable MNIST digits, and this just went ahead and spat out MNIST digits in like two minutes.
Ian Goodfellow, Ian Goodfellow on Inventing GANs
There's not any Markov chain iteration like you see with Boltzmann machines or diffusion algorithms.
Ian Goodfellow, Ian Goodfellow on Inventing GANs