advanced~4h

3 Techniques to Train an LLM Using Another LLM (Distillation)

Soft-label, hard-label, and co-distillation — the three ways real production LLMs (Llama 4, Gemma, DeepSeek) train a smaller student model using a larger teacher.

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📚 Prerequisites(1)

🎓 Learning objectives

  • Explain the difference between pre-training-stage and post-training-stage distillation
  • Contrast soft-label distillation's memory cost problem with hard-label distillation's fix
  • Explain co-distillation's simultaneous teacher-student training process
  • Name real production models trained with each distillation technique

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