Garry Tan advocates for US open-weight labs to use distillation
September 13, 2026
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan supports US-based open-weight labs using distillation techniques on frontier models to counter Chinese competition. This strategy aims to build a robust domestic open-weight ecosystem by leveraging existing frontier model reasoning through extensive prompting and training.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
●
founderYou may find more support for using frontier model outputs to train specialized smaller models.
●
policyThis highlights an ongoing debate regarding the regulation of model knowledge extraction.