Models
Distillation
Training a small, cheap model to imitate a big, expensive one.
Distillation is a way to shrink AI down to size. A large, powerful model acts as a teacher, and a much smaller student model learns to copy its answers. The result is a compact model that captures a lot of the teacher's ability while running far faster and cheaper, which is handy for phones and everyday apps.
For example
A giant flagship model can be distilled into a lightweight version that runs smoothly on a laptop.
Related
Reasoning modelAn AI that pauses to think through a problem step by step before answering.Mixture of expertsA big model split into specialists, only a few of which handle each question.Open weights vs closedWhether a model's inner settings are shared publicly or kept private.QuantizationRounding a model's numbers to make it smaller and faster.