distillation

Noun

distillation (countable and uncountable, plural distillations)

1. The act of falling in drops, or the act of pouring out in drops.
2. That which falls in drops.
3. (chemical engineering) Purification through repeated or continuous distilling; rectification.
4. (chemical engineering) Separation of petroleum into specific hydrocarbon groups; fractionation.
5. The substance extracted by distilling.
   • to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking / clothes that fretted in their own grease.c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merry Wiues of Windsor”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
   • Then, were not summer's distillation left,
     A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass […]1609, William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 5”, in Shake-speares Sonnets. […], London: By G[eorge] Eld for T[homas] T[horpe] and are to be sold by William Aspley, →OCLC
6. (machine learning) A technique in which a neural network is trained on the outputs or behaviour of a more complex model in order to transfer selected knowledge and capabilities to a smaller, more focused, or more efficient model.
   • 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.2025 January 29, Cade Metz, “OpenAI Says DeepSeek May Have Improperly Harvested Its Data”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
   • Anthropic says three Chinese firms used ‘distillation’ technique to extract information from its Claude chatbot[.]2026 February 23, “US AI giant accuses Chinese rivals of mass data theft”, in The Guardian, sourced from Agence France-Presse, →ISSN
7. (machine learning) A model produced by such a process.