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Comment by acgourley | Hacker News Reader

This is not obvious to me! For example, if you locked me in a room with no information inputs, over time I may still become more intelligent by your measures. Through play and reflection I can prune, reconcile and generate. I need compute to do this, but not necessarily more knowledge.

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Again, this isn't how distillation work. Your task as the distillation model is to copy mistakes, and you will be penalized by pruning reconciling and generating.

"Play and reflection" is something else, which isn't distillation.

The initial claim was that distillation can never be used to create a model B that's smarter than model A, because B only has access to A's knowledge. The argument you're responding to was that play and reflection can result in improvements without any additional knowledge, so it is possible for distillation to work as a starting point to create a model B that is smarter than model A, with no new data except model A's outputs and then model B's outputs. This refutes the initial claim. It is not important for distillation alone to be enough, if it can be made to be enough with a few extra steps afterward.

You’ve subtly confused “less accurate” and “smarter” in your argument. In other words you’ve replaced the benchmark of representing the base data with the benchmark of reasoning score.

Then, you’ve asserted that was the original claim.

Sneaky! But that’s how “arguments” on HN are “won”.

No, I didn't confuse the two. There is not a formal definition of "smart", but if you're claiming that factual accuracy is unrelated to it, I can't imagine that that's in good faith.

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