Stage 3 — The Teacher (2023)

Weeks after ChatGPT's API opened, imitation learning industrialized — the

teacher is a model.

• Alpaca (Stanford) — a $600 fine-tune on GPT-generated instructions

cloned much of a frontier model's behavior.

• Vicuna — trained on shared user conversations scraped from the web.
• Orca (Microsoft) — rich teacher explanations rather than bare answers.
• On-policy distillation — matured imitation into a proper training

discipline, fixing the train/inference mismatch.

• DeepSeek-R1 — shipped a family of distilled models alongside the

flagship, making "the teacher is a model" the default assumption for

small-model releases since.

Education — explanation, demonstration, correction — turned out to be

perfectly simulable.