Distillation
Observing Semantic Drift
The other day, I was sent a message that confused me at first. It read approximately
… the culture has been distilled down to a weaker version of what it once was …
Surely it meant “diluted”? To “distill” would be to make something stronger and more pure (for example to a liquid).
Of course, this is in the Bay Area, and over here, “distillation” is most commonly used to refer to the process of taking pure Claude transcripts and using them to produce them to an imprecise simulacrum.1
It will be amusing if this meaning is adopted more widely outside its initial context. What word would replace it? Will things now be “concentrated”, or is that exclusive to juice?
Footnotes
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Originally, one distilled large teacher models into smaller ones, but now the technique is often used effectively to extract the intelligence of proprietary models. ↩
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