Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.
Cheeky Pint · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · October 2026
Collison asked why no single lab ran away with AI, as many predicted in 2023. Wang gave uneven execution across labs as one reason and distillation as another: it keeps open-source models close to the frontier and packs strong capabilities into smaller models.
…probably be able to stay in the lead. So I think that's one factor. I think the power and strength of distillation is certainly another factor that's certainly benefiting the open source ecosystem quite a bit. And I think this is just like a— John Collison There's an anti-hegemonic force in the phenomenon of distilling a model. Alexandr Wang Yeah. And this is just a quality of the technology. It's not like anyone planned for distillation to work super duper well, but it just turns out that you can get a lot of capabilities naturally through some form of distillation. And this is, broadly speaking, distillation is quite a good force for the entire ecosystem because it means that you can pack very strong intelligence capabilities into smaller and smaller models, which enables us to serve them at much wider scale. And that's certainly one of the very exciting stories is just like really small models today are like, you know, much more powerful than the biggest…