From Silicon Valley to DC, the tech world is suddenly obsessed with one concept in AI: Distillation

Jeff Dean, head of artificial intelligence at Google LLC, speaks during a Google AI event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020.David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesEarlier this year, Google AI lead Jeff Dean, on a podcast, discussed a concept that, at the time, was hardly spoken about outside of wonky tech circles: distillation. In talking about the development of Google's AI models, Dean said that he and colleagues discovered artificial intelligence distillation techniques because Google was looking to improve performance on its systems without relying on one large image recognition model. "Through distillation, which is a key technique for making the smaller models more capable, you have to have the frontier model in order to then distill it into your smaller model," Dean said in February. Five months later, distillation has suddenly become a hot-button topic from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C., as techies and lawmakers debate whether the practice is turning into a national security threat and enabling China to catch the U.S. in the high-stakes AI race. Concern bubbled up late last week after Chinese lab Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, and users ...