Making Distilled Models from DeepSeek-R1

Imagine you’re compressing a large, detailed book into a concise guide. The original book contains deep insights, examples, and background information, but you need a version that captures the key ideas in a more efficient form. By carefully summarizing, you retain the most important lessons and core concepts, making the guide easier to use while still preserving the essence of the original. This process of transferring knowledge into a more compact and efficient form reflects the idea of distillation.

But what is distillation?

Model distillation

Now, let’s talk AI. Just like steeping tea, In AI, distillation refers to a method where we train a smaller model (called the student) to mimic a larger, more powerful model (the teacher). The goal? To retain as much intelligence as possible while making the smaller model fast and efficient. This is crucial because running massive models on everyday devices would be like trying to run a Ferrari engine inside a bicycle.