What is AI distillation? The new threat facing western tech giants as US accuses Chinese firms of ‘aggressively’ copying frontier models

The US has accused Chinese companies of stealing AI capabilities via "aggressive, malicious and targeted" distillation at an industrial scale. Distillation is a technique by which one model is trained on the outputs of a stronger or better model, but it can be abused to extract features and capabilities more quickly and at a lower cost than doing...