distillation

plural distillations

1. countableuncountableThe act of falling in drops, or the act of pouring out in drops.
2. countableuncountableThat which falls in drops.
3. The separation of more volatile parts of a substance from less volatile ones by evaporation and condensation.
   1. countableuncountablechemical engineeringchemistryPurification through repeated or continuous distilling; rectification.
   2. countableuncountablechemical engineeringchemistrySeparation of petroleum into specific hydrocarbon groups; fractionation.
4. countableuncountableThe substance extracted by distilling.

   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

   1 more example

   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] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene v], line 104

5. countableuncountablemachine learningA 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.

   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

   2 more examples

   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

   Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy, said in a social media post on Wednesday that “illicit, adversarial distillation is IP theft and industrial espionage that supports adversary military and intelligence capabilities.”

   2026 July 25, Mike Isaac, Kate Conger, Ana Swanson, Meaghan Tobin, quoting Sarah Heck, “Silicon Valley Splits Over Closing the Borders to Chinese A.I.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

6. countableuncountablemachine learningA model produced by such a process.