Opus 4.6 distills: Real gains or hype

Distillation of "thought traces" allows 20B-30B parameter models to emulate the reasoning depth of much larger systems. High-quality projects like Unsloth are bridging the gap between local speed and frontier-class logic, though a "grift" culture has emerged leveraging the Opus 4.6 brand for thin datasets. Additionally, "abliterated" variants remain popular for bypassing guardrails, while efficiency remains the primary driver as users seek high-level reasoning on consumer GPUs like the RTX 4090.