Is Distillation Overrated?
eliebakouch · x · 2026-07-11
The author doubts that distillation's importance in pretraining may be overrated, especially regarding its impact on capability beyond compute efficiency. Comments cite a comparison between Sonnet 5 and GLM 5.2, arguing the former is not stronger and may be worse, countering the intuition that distillation gives a significant competitive edge.
The core view: distillation is more like a warm start for RL. US labs may use human data for the same start, while Chinese labs often use tokens from US models. In the author's view, the final models are roughly comparable, but the former saves compute and the latter depends on extra human data.
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