Pedro Domingos' 'Six Degrees of Distillation': Chinese Models Distill from US
pmddomingos · x · 2026-08-01
Renowned ML scholar Pedro Domingos outlined the 'Six degrees of distillation' in AI:
- Humans distill knowledge from the world
- The Internet is distilled human knowledge
- US AI models distill from the Internet
- Chinese models distill from US ones
- Application companies distill from Chinese models
- Users distill from applications
This offers a witty and sharp perspective on the current knowledge transfer chain and ecosystem from frontier research down to end users.
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