Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. There’s a new wrinkle in the saga of Chinese company DeepSeek’s recent announcement of a super-capable R1 model that combines high ...

The AI industry is witnessing a transformative trend: the use of distillation to make AI models smaller and cheaper. This shift, spearheaded by companies like DeepSeek and OpenAI, is reshaping the AI ...

Model distillation is one of the technology trends that has reached a level of maturity identified in Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for artificial intelligence (AI) as “the slope of enlightenment”.

Distillation, also known as model or knowledge distillation, is a process where knowledge is transferred from a large, complex AI ‘teacher’ model to a smaller and more efficient ‘student’ model. Doing ...