What is Distillation in Applied AI?
A training method where a smaller student model learns to mimic the outputs of a larger teacher model. The student inherits much of the teacher's capability at a fraction of the inference cost. Distillation is how frontier labs ship smaller, cheaper variants of their flagship models.
Why Distillation Matters for Your AI or Cybersecurity Career
Anyone choosing between a 70B model and a 7B distilled student needs to understand the tradeoffs. Production cost models depend on it.
Related Applied AI Terms
A training method where a smaller student model learns to mimic the outputs of a larger teacher model. The student inherits much of the teacher's capability at a fraction of the inference cost. Distillation is how frontier labs ship smaller, cheaper variants of their flagship models.
Anyone choosing between a 70B model and a 7B distilled student needs to understand the tradeoffs. Production cost models depend on it.
Definitions are original explanations written for career development purposes. For authoritative technical definitions, refer to NIST, ISO, or the relevant standards body.
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