I don't get these "distilled" comments. How would one realistically go about distilling the 1-2TB closed source frontier model behind the oracle (provider) ? Just genuinely curious.

In their thinking and if you ask them, I've seen Kimi K3 and other models confidently say that they are Claude from Anthropic, and accuse you of attempting to jailbreak them if you say otherwise.

When people say distilling they mean SFT on other models outputs.

They're cope, as if Anthropic or OpenAI have some magic moat, and not just basically a headstart and more money.