Model Distillation in the API

We’re introducing a new Model Distillation offering to provide developers with an integrated workflow to manage the entire distillation pipeline directly within the OpenAI platform. This lets developers easily use the outputs of frontier models like o1‑preview and GPT‑4o to fine-tune and improve the performance of more cost-efficient models like GPT‑4o mini.

Model distillation involves fine-tuning smaller, cost-efficient models using outputs from more capable models, allowing them to match the performance of advanced models on specific tasks at a much lower cost. Until now, distillation has been a multi-step, error-prone process, which required developers to manually orchestrate multiple operations across disconnected tools, from generating datasets to fine-tuning models and measuring performance improvements. Since distillation is inherently iterative, developers needed to repeatedly run each step, adding significant effort and complexity.

Our new Model Distillation suite includes: