Transfer Learning: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Unless you have a massive dataset and a cluster of GPUs, training a state-of-the-art model from scratch is usually a waste of time. I use transfer learning all the time. Why build a CNN from zero when you can take a pre-trained ResNet or BERT and fine-tune it for your specific task? It saves weeks of training time and often yields better results. It’s one of the most practical techniques in modern ML. Don’t reinvent the wheel; just adapt it to fit your road.