This is BS to pressure politicians.

Even an openai's guy (head of something made up) called bs on the idea you can train something like k3 by distillation.

Anybody I know who works in LLM research says that distillation is either useless or merely useful in post training to show "correct" behavior.

And even then you don't get a competing model, if RL on good prompts was that useful, all labs would've long skyrocketed in capabilities just by looping on increasingly better prompts, yet that doesn't work.