Knowledge Distillation
Train a small model to be as smart as a giant one.
Teacher Model
(GPT-4 / Claude 3.5)
Synthetic Data
Student Model
(Llama 3 8B / Mistral)
The Distillation Strategy
High-end models (Teachers) are slow and expensive to call. By having them generate "Gold Standard" answers for your specific domain, you can train a much smaller, cheaper model (Student) to copy their reasoning patterns.
This is how top AI startups achieve "GPT-4 Level" performance in specific niches (like medical or legal) while paying "Llama-3" prices for inference.