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The Madison Avenue Field GuideA field guide to marketing & advertising, by Brandon Mina

GlossaryAI in MarketingModel 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 MinaCEO, BrandPilot AIUpdated 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.