Asked on the stand whether he knew what model distillation … Read the full story at The Verge. In a federal courtroom in California on Thursday, Elon Musk testified that his own AI startup, xAI, has used OpenAI's models to improve its own. The matter at question is model distillation, a common industry practice by which one larger AI model acts as a "teacher" of sorts to pass on knowledge to a smaller AI model, the "student." Although it's often used legitimately within companies using one of their own AI models to train another, it's also a practice that's sometimes used by smaller AI labs to try to get their models to mimic the performance of a larger competitor's model.