Distillation angle overrated: frontier reasoning gains mostly come from internal RL, argues analyst
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-10-17
teortaxesTex argues the "distillation" angle is overrated: modern ChatGPT/Claude chain-of-thought doesn't resemble distilled outputs, and they've even achieved fairly concise operation. He concludes reasoning gains mostly stem from internal RL, with frontier models substituting for custom training data. The attached screenshot shows a model's lengthy Think process while generating a synthwave cat image, offered as a counterexample of what real frontier CoT doesn't look like.
More from Models
- Training-free Confident Decoding skips final layers, cuts alignment tax, boosts reasoning — aiamblichus · 2026-10-17
- Gemini Pro subscriber details crash bugs and forced model downgrades in app — Kindly_Rough_4300 · 2026-10-17
- 'No, the whale didn't distill Sol': DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash comparison sparks memes — cedric_chee · 2026-10-17
- Gemini 3 vs Opus 4.5 vs GPT-5.1 vs Grok 4: same-prompt 3D diorama showdown — cedric_chee · 2026-10-17
- DeepSeek's monthly release cadence pressures Zai and Moonshot's premium pricing — zephyr_z9 · 2026-10-17
- Aleph Alpha open-sources Kolibri-1: 78B MoE with 1M context, llama.cpp support lands — jacek2023 · 2026-10-17