Distillation

A technique for training a smaller, cheaper model to copy the behavior of a larger, more capable one, so you get much of the quality at a fraction of the running cost. The large model acts as a teacher and the small model as a student. This is increasingly how the AI tools people actually use are built, because the biggest models are expensive to run at scale. For a healthcare audience the point is that a small fast model in a product may be a distilled version of a frontier model, and it can carry both the strengths and the blind spots of its teacher.

Terms like this come up in real clinical scenarios across the HelloAI courses: bite-sized modules with verifiable certificates. An account takes one minute, no password needed.