distillation

Distillation is how teams get large-model quality at small-model cost on a specific job. The interviewer wants to know when that trade is worth the engineering, and what can go wrong.

At a billion requests a day, a fraction of a cent per call is millions of dollars a month and every millisecond is capacity. Principal answers start from the arithmetic and reshape the feature, the models and the serving to fit.

Synthetic data is cheap and fast, but provider terms, inherited errors and narrow coverage decide whether it helps. Check the contract first, then design the data and the evaluation.