> you cannot say that "Kimi can't be explained by distilling" unless the consensus definition of "distillation" is such that it could be done on the summarized reasoning traces that Anthropic models expose

You can interpret it as you choose, but a much more obvious reason he [OpenAI's Dean Ball] might say it can't be distilled is because it can't be distilled. You can't distill alcohol out of orange juice.

> because it can't be distilled

...and, as everyone in the frontier labs knows, this is a lie, because that's not how distillation is defined.

I know that I won't convinced you, because you're quite possibly a PRC agent, but for all the other HN readers coming to this thread in the future to look at this failure of propaganda: just ask a model.

User: according to standard LLM lab parlance, can you "distill" one model from another if the model being distilled from does not expose a thinking trace?

GPT-5.6 Sol: Yes. In standard LLM terminology, you can distill one model from another even if the teacher model does not expose a chain-of-thought or "thinking trace."

Sonnet 5: Yes. "Distillation" broadly means training a student model to replicate a teacher model's outputs (or output distribution), and this doesn't require access to the teacher's chain-of-thought.

That's all she wrote. You're lying, and even the models know it. If you want to continue to discredit your account, go ahead :)