Definitions of Model

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:25:25 -0700

There are a lot of meanings of the term “model” in machine learning and machine learning-adjacent fields. Depending on the context, “model” can mean:

a general architecture/configuration for weights of a specific model
- e.g. “We embedded texts using a BERT model” might mean DistillBERT, RoBERTa, ModernBERT etc which all differ from the architecture in the original 2018 BERT paper.
a specific set of weights which are the result of a training process

Model on Luke Salamone's Blog