Why distillation works for simple tasks but fails for long-horizon agents like a GameBoy emulator
JoshPurtell · x · 2026-09-03
Josh Purtell argues distillation is tempting for long-horizon agent development but feasibility depends on the task: one-shot domain-specific structured output tasks are trivial to synthesize data for given gold outputs, while long-horizon tasks (e.g. building a GameBoy emulator) make reliable rollout data synthesis extremely hard without running a frontier model end to end and careful hinting.
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