DeepSeek this month rocked the technology sector with a new AI model that appeared to rival the capabilities of US giants like OpenAI, but at much lower cost. And the China-based company gave away the code for free.
Some technologists believe that DeepSeek’s model may have learned from US models to make some of its gains.
The distillation technique involves having an older, more established and powerful AI model evaluate the quality of the answers coming out of a newer model, effectively transferring the older model’s learnings.