Friday, 31 July, 2026
AI’s Secret Shortcut: The Tech Dispute Behind US-China Rivalry
By TechShots Studio
AI model distillation transfers knowledge from a large "teacher" model to train a smaller, cheaper "student" model using its outputs and reasoning steps.It has become a geopolitical flashpoint as US tech giants accuse Chinese firms of using distillation to extract advanced capabilities from closed frontier models—enabling China to bypass US chip export restrictions and build powerful AI at a fraction of the cost.