How do you distill a large LLM into a smaller one, and what are the approaches?

Distillation buys you most of a frontier model's quality at a fraction of the serving cost. The signal is naming the three LLM-specific variants and knowing which one works against a closed API. Here is the answer.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.