Simon Willison’s Weblog

7th February 2020

Deep learning isn’t hard anymore. This article does a great job of explaining how transfer learning is unlocking a new wave of innovation around deep learning. Previously if you wanted to train a model you needed vast amounts if data and thousands of dollars of compute time. Thanks to transfer learning you can now take an existing model (such as GPT2) and train something useful on top of it that’s specific to a new domain in just minutes it hours, with only a few hundred or a few thousand new labeled samples.