AI Glossary
Transfer learning
What is Transfer learning?
A machine learning technique where a model trained on one task is adapted for a related task. Foundation models are trained once at great cost, then transfer-learned (fine-tuned) cheaply for specific applications — the basis of modern commercial AI deployment.
Example in practice
A company that fine-tunes a general-purpose model on their proprietary customer support conversations is using transfer learning — they leverage the model's existing language knowledge and specialise it for their specific domain.