No, the steps 1 vs 2+3 refer to different things, they do not depend on each other. They start with the distillation process (which is probably easier because i

No, the steps 1 vs 2+3 refer to different things, they do not depend on each other. They start with the distillation process (which is probably easier because it just requires synthetic data). Then they will try to recreate the R1 itself (first r1zero in step 2, and then the r1 in step 3), which is harder because it requires more training data and training in general. But in principle they do not need step 1 to go to step 2.