Glossary/AI in Marketing/Model Distillation
AI in Marketing
Model Distillation
Training a smaller 'student' model to mimic a larger 'teacher' model, delivering similar quality at lower cost and latency.
By Brandon Mina·CEO, BrandPilot AI·Updated November 2026
Short answer
Model distillation is a technique for training a smaller student model to mimic the outputs of a larger teacher model. The student learns to approximate the teacher's behavior, delivering similar quality on targeted tasks at lower cost and latency. It lets companies run capable AI features more cheaply and sometimes directly on devices.