Distillation May Not Capture Deep Reasoning
willccbb · x · 2026-07-11
The author disagrees with the notion that Sonnet 5 would be highly capable simply by distilling knowledge from a deeper model.
The core argument is that deeper models inherently require fewer tokens for reasoning. Forcing Sonnet to mimic this pattern might lead it to learn surface-level behaviors like "skipping internal steps," ultimately causing reasoning bottlenecks or increased hallucinations.
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