[DoctorOetker]

suppose one has an idea for a different architecture / functional form etc, assuming the receiving model is substantially smaller so that the dominant computational cost is in the SD model, how long would effective knowledge distillation take on say a CPU?

[astrange]

That’s called teacher-student learning. It could still take weeks on a single machine easily, but renting more GPU time or getting free credits from somewhere is perfectly plausible.