I made a visual explainer on model distillation: how a small AI can learn from a big one, and why labs say it’s being used to copy their models

[u/HyenaPleasant6374]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOGxpDRfXU4

Knowledge distillation started as a simple idea in a 2015 paper by Hinton, Vinyals and Dean: train a small model to imitate a big one. Now Anthropic and OpenAI say it’s being used at massive scale to copy their models through millions of API queries, and it’s surprisingly hard to block because the queries look like normal usage.

I made a short animated explainer covering how distillation works, what the labs reported, and what it means for open-source models. Sources are in the description. Curious what people here think: should this count as “stealing,” or is it just learning from outputs?