this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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It is actually not so difficult to see this for yourself in a much simplified setting. One can easily build a "Small Language Model" that extracts correlations between only three consecutive words. On the web there's plenty of short scripts that do this; here and here is one example. The output created by such a SLM can have remarkably long sentences with grammatical meaning (see the examples in the links above); this is remarkable since all it learned was correlations between triplets of words.
Now you can take a large amount of output from such a SLM, and use it to train a second, identical or even better SLM, then check the output generated by this second one. You'll see that the new output is less coherent than the one from the first SLM. Give the output of the second SLM to a third, and you'll see even less coherent text coming out. And so on.
Yeah but there’s also some interesting nuances. I’ve seen smaller models on HuggingFace that, if I interpret them correctly, were tuned unsupervised using the output of larger models. So it seems there might be some validity to doing some things this way, so long as the other model is larger.
What you're referencing is distillation. Anthropic even has an article on distillation "attacks" (as if they have some divine right to the data behind their models) that goes over it a bit.