# AI model distillation, explained: the cheap way to inherit an expensive model’s brain

Building a capable AI model on the cheap comes down to one trick: get somebody else's costly system to do the teaching for you. That single sentence contains the entire dispute. The argument went public in January of last year, when the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shipped R1, its first model. On sev

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| Published | 5 August 2026 |

Source: https://egamers.io/ai-model-distillation-explained-the-cheap-way-to-inherit-an-expensive-models-brain/