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Comment by airstrafer | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'd expect model performance to be super spiky on SWE work, at least they admit it with the name of the model. It's distilled from an already-distilled model.

Maybe still worth it if their "64% cheaper" figure holds.

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I don't think you know what distill means

I guess I don't. Does post-training from another (larger) model not fall under the umbrella of distillation? I'd imagine it leads to the same spiky-ness issues...?

Distilling you don't have the actual model weights of the teacher. All you have are the teachers answers to a lot of questions. You then teach your own smaller model to answer more similarly to the big teacher model.

Fine tuning you have the actual model weights of the original model, you then train that model to answer in a different (or better) way.

Distillation requires you to have the actual logits of each token from the teacher model, which in practice means having the model itself.

What you're describing is just synthetic data.

Note Anthropic misused the term in their post about Chinese model distillation, deliberately I assume.

There are multiple kinds of distillation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03310

https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12106

With the Devin subscription even at the 20$ plan, they offered unlimited SWE 1.7 usage. Wondering if they do the same for SWE 2.

SWE-2 is free for all subscribers on the CLI to try out for the next month :)

What about the gui/windsurf app? Same as cli?

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