GPT-5.4 Pro sparks distillation debate

The frontier model is probably too much of a black box to copy cheaply. OpenAI positions GPT-5.4 Pro as the slowest, highest-reasoning, most expensive GPT-5.4 variant, built to spend more compute per answer. The thread's case for Opus 4.6 is really about observability: commenters point to public traces and a more human-feeling behavior profile as a cleaner distillation target. A few hundred or even a few thousand synthetic generations would likely improve style and prompt adherence more than raw capability. For local targets like Qwen 3.5 27B, a narrower teacher plus task-specific SFT/RL will probably beat a blind "distill the smartest model" approach. OpenAI's API docs explicitly list distillation as not supported for GPT-5.4 Pro, which is the strongest practical clue in the discussion.