Researchers trained an OpenAI rival in half an hour for less than $50

To do this, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington used a method known as distillation — which allows smaller models to draw from the answers produced by larger ones — to refine s1 using answers from Google’s AI reasoning model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. Google’s terms of service note that you can’t use Gemini’s API to “develop models that compete with” the company’s AI models. The Verge reached out to Google with a request for comment but…