english word · 2026-09-28
distillation
noun
Meaning
The process of creating a smaller, faster AI model that retains the knowledge of a much larger, more complex one. It is like a master chef condensing a massive recipe book into a single page of essential secrets that still produces the same great flavor.
Etymology
From the Latin 'distillare', meaning to trickle down or drop; historically used for extracting the pure essence of a substance.
Examples
"Through model distillation, the engineering team managed to run the powerful chatbot directly on a smartphone without losing accuracy."
"The startup used distillation to reduce their server costs while maintaining the high performance of their original neural network."
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