> There was never any plausible explanation for why this wouldn’t happen.

What a nice post hoc revision of history. Distillation is still an active area of research, that you can distill models as easily as you can it genuinely interesting and absolutely not something that was taken for granted even 12 months ago.

Even 6 months ago this idea that 'using model outputs as training examples' was listed as the reason that all models would fail in the near future due to some spooky circular training catastrophe.

Don't pretend like this was so obvious.