How model distillation got complicated
The technology is ready. The business model is not.
There is a version of model distillation that works well. It is not the cheapest one, and it is rarely the one in the demo.
Subscriber story
Continue reading with a subscription
This piece is part of the subscriber archive. Subscribe to the daily brief for full access — one email, no card, cancel any time.
Already a subscriber?
#agents#infrastructure#datasets
More in this section
🔒aiSubscriber
Why small models are winning on-device
Four-bit quantization plus better distillation is making 3B models genuinely useful in production.
🔒aiSubscriber
Synthetic data is hitting a wall nobody wants to name
Model collapse is real, but the more immediate problem is boring: attribution and licensing.
ai
The open-weights licence split is becoming permanent
Two families of licence, two incompatible expectations, and a lot of downstream confusion.