Ahmad Al-Dahle outlines five myths about AI model distillation

Al-Dahle argues that distillation is a standard training method used inside labs, under licenses, or without authorization, so it does not by itself show theft.

He says a few million conversations are small against trillion-token runs, yet can matter in late-stage training, reinforcement learning bootstrapping, or training a grader.

He also argues that model outputs are hard to trace after paraphrasing or mixing, and that transferred capability is difficult to measure.