70% of production AI teams use open source models. 72.5% connect agents to databases, not chat interfaces. This is what 375 technical builders actually ship - & it looks nothing like Twitter AI.
70% of teams use open source models in some capacity. 48% describe their strategy as mostly open. 22% commit to only open. Just 11% stay purely proprietary.
Ten months ago, DeepSeek collapsed AI training costs by 90% using distillation - transferring knowledge from larger models to smaller ones at a fraction of the cost.
Distillation works like a tutor training a student : a large model teaches a smaller one.1 As we’ve shifted from knowledge retrieval to agentic systems, we wondered if there was a parallel technique for tool calling.2
Could a large model teach a smaller one to call the right tools?