Intriguingly, there’s reason to believe the R1 distills are nowhere close to their peak performance. In the R1 paper they say that the models are released as proofs of concept of the power of distillation, and the performance can probably be improved by doing an additional reinforcement learning step (like what was done to turn V3 into R1). But they said they basically couldn’t be bothered to do it and are leaving it for the community to try.
2025 is going to be very interesting in this space.
Intriguingly, there’s reason to believe the R1 distills are nowhere close to their peak performance. In the R1 paper they say that the models are released as proofs of concept of the power of distillation, and the performance can probably be improved by doing an additional reinforcement learning step (like what was done to turn V3 into R1). But they said they basically couldn’t be bothered to do it and are leaving it for the community to try.
2025 is going to be very interesting in this space.