June 18, 2026·2 min read
Welcome to The AI Distillery
Why we're building a knowledgebase at the frontier of model distillation — and what it means to make frontier intelligence small enough to own.
announcementmanifesto
The Distillery blog
Notes from the still — distillation techniques, new small models, benchmarks, and dispatches from a field being invented in real time.
June 16, 2026·3 min read
How 800,000 traces gave small models o1-class reasoning
The DeepSeek-R1 distillation recipe was almost embarrassingly simple — and it rewrote what we thought small open models could do. A look at why it worked.
reasoningDeepSeek-R1case study
June 12, 2026·3 min read
Is distilling from GPT-4 legal? The OpenAI–DeepSeek question
The contractual, not copyright, fight over model distillation — what the terms of service actually say, what's alleged, and why the law here is genuinely untested.
legalpolicycontroversy