Distillation from a teacher model solves the self-start problem, that is, building a model to the point where it reason coherently. Without distillation, solving self-start is incredibly difficult since it requires millions of high quality training samples. Creating that kind of dataset takes an enormous amount of effort.

Once a model becomes competent enough to perform complex reasoning, a teacher model is no longer necessary. The model can now reason about its own behavior and build a better version of itself through recursive self-improvement (RSI).

Kimi K3 is capable of RSI.