SAM3 is probably a great model to distill from when training smaller segmentation models, but isn't their DINOv2 a better example of a large foundation model to distill from for various computer vision tasks? I've seen it used for as starting point for models doing segmentation and depth estimation. Maybe there's a v3 coming soon?

https://dinov2.metademolab.com/

DINOv3 was released earlier this year: https://ai.meta.com/dinov3/

I'm not sure if the work they did with DINOv3 went into SAM3. I don't see any mention of it in the paper, though I just skimmed it.