distillation

noun

Etymology: From Middle English distillacioun, from Anglo-Norman distillacioun, from Latin distīllātiōnem, accusative of distīllātiō.

1. The act of falling in drops, or the act of pouring out in drops.
2. That which falls in drops.
3. The separation of more volatile parts of a substance from less volatile ones by evaporation and condensation.
4. The separation of more volatile parts of a substance from less volatile ones by evaporation and condensation.
5. The substance extracted by distilling.

   “to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking / clothes that fretted in their own grease.”

   “Then, were not summer's distillation left, A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass […]”

6. The transformation of a complex large language model into a smaller one.

   “Distillation is often used to train new systems. If a company takes data from proprietary technology, the practice may be legally problematic. But it is often allowed by open source technologies.”

   “Anthropic says three Chinese firms used ‘distillation’ technique to extract information from its Claude chatbot[.]”