A Brief History of AI Model Distillation

·2026.07.03 09:00

Key point

Distillation, which began as a model compression technique, has now become a core technique for transferring reasoning ability between models and the center of a copyright controversy.

Details

Distillation initially began as a means to compress large models into smaller, cheaper models.

It has now evolved into a core post-training technique for transferring the instruction-following and reasoning capabilities of frontier models.

Used by DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, and others, this approach stands at the center of open model development, while also sparking debate over whether using the outputs of closed models for training constitutes unauthorized copying.

qwen deepseek model-compression distillation post-training glm

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