For the past week, the term “distillation” has been tormenting my mind. Below, I share my understanding in chronological order.
Day One: First Encounter with “Distillation”
While interpreting technologies like DeepSeek and ChatGPT, the term “distillation” kept surfacing. It refers to transferring knowledge from a large, powerful “teacher model” to a lighter, faster “student model.”
DeepSeek achieves this by extracting the deep reasoning logic (CoT) generated by top-tier models. This enables smaller models to handle complex problems with near-equivalent performance to large models, yet at a fraction of the computational cost.
It’s akin to a master teacher imparting the essence of a lifetime’s learning, sparing students the need to start from scratch. Thus, small models can tackle complex problems with great wisdom at minimal cost. Students avoid retracing the teacher’s detours, instead standing on the shoulders of giants to inherit refined thought patterns.
Day Two: Tracing the Origins of “Distillation”
The term “distillation” traces its roots to the essence of ancient brewing techniques. Artisans heated raw liquor, transforming its essence into vapor that condensed upon cooling. This process separated excess water and impurities, retaining only the purest, most mellow heart of the liquor. At its core, distillation is the art of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Modern AI’s “model distillation” shares this same principle. It isn’t mere compression, but the extraction of the most critical logical frameworks and decision-making capabilities from vast data and complex computations. Like repeatedly purifying a cask of new wine until only half a cup of potent spirit remains—small in volume yet distilled with all its essence, its flavor becomes richer and more enduring.
Day Three: Distillation in Daily Life
My ten-year-old son has recently become obsessed with riding his bike. Watching his youthful, spirited figure, I can’t help but worry as a father. But I also know that lengthy lectures about inertia and traffic laws would likely fall on deaf ears at this age.
So I distilled all my concerns and knowledge, letting them simmer and cool within me until they crystallized into three sentences he could understand and remember:
Ride on the right, stop at red lights, keep clear of large vehicles.
These three sentences contain no explanation of centrifugal force and balance, no analysis of right-of-way rules or yielding etiquette, and not even an emphasis on the importance of safety helmets—they simply distill complex cycling safety into a few most fundamental, instinctive rules of conduct.
Day Four: Distillation in Practice
Our decade-long SEO strategy—“Four Appearances of One Keyword” (placing the core keyword four times per article)—is a prime example of distillation:
No need to grasp every detail of search algorithms;
Retain only the most essential, effective techniques;
Actionable and reusable.
In my previous article, I mentioned the concept of “information increment,” which distilled the logic behind AI content crawling. This is essentially a highly distilled application of AI content processing principles.
Day Five: Distillation in Business
Reading Xiaomi’s methodology, I realized it’s a commercial application of distillation thinking.
Xiaomi pursues “balanced user experience and optimal cost-performance, not specs overload.” For example, when designing the Redmi Note phone, they selected the best processor for the price, configured an appropriate camera setup, and ensured system stability.
This is distillation at the product level: compressing complex technical capabilities into the core experiences users truly need, making products easy to use, low-cost, and high-quality.
Day Six: Formulas Are the Highest Form of “Distillation”
Scientific progress is essentially humanity’s distillation of the laws governing the universe:
Galileo observed rolling spheres, isolating the law of acceleration from friction and gravity, paving the way for Newton’s derivation of F=ma. Kepler distilled chaotic planetary observations into three fundamental laws.
Scientific giants distilled vast natural phenomena into concise symbolic expressions, enabling future generations to predict the future with minimal effort.
Day Seven: Wisdom as the “Distilled” World
Confucius established a millennia-spanning foundation for conduct with just three words: benevolence, righteousness, and propriety. Zhuangzi used the parable of “Zhou Sheng’s Butterfly Dream” to weave the philosophical interplay of self and object, reality and illusion, into a realm of dreamlike transcendence.
Sages distilled the complex world into genuine wisdom that pierces the heart and transcends time.
When AI finally learns to “distill” the world like humans, will it ultimately refine a “ultimate wisdom” we can comprehend—or another cold “cosmic essence” we cannot decipher?