The large differences between gemini-2.5-pro and the gemini-X-flash and gemma models is surprising. It looks like distillation causes an ideological shift. Some, but not all of the other distilled models also show that shift.
Pet theory: distillation causes roughly-random changes, and political alignment wasn't the most important part of the evals for which distill got released, coding skills etc were.
Comments
The large differences between gemini-2.5-pro and the gemini-X-flash and gemma models is surprising. It looks like distillation causes an ideological shift. Some, but not all of the other distilled models also show that shift.
Pet theory: distillation causes roughly-random changes, and political alignment wasn't the most important part of the evals for which distill got released, coding skills etc were.