HF's Merve Noyan shares beginner guides for zero-shot classifiers, says many LLM tasks never needed them

ceciletamura · x · 2026-09-21

Hugging Face's Merve Noyan shared a set of beginner-friendly guides for text classifiers, covering both standard fine-tuning (DeBERTa, ModernBERT) and zero-shot classification, plus a multimodal image-text example, with links to relevant models on the Hub.

In her accompanying commentary she quipped that people comparing small classifiers against GPT-5.6 have clearly never fine-tuned a BERTForXYZ for a living — zero-shot classifiers are fascinating but were never scaled the way decoder-only models were, and many problems now solved with LLMs could have been solved with them. 'It was a skill issue.'

Original post →

More from Models

Models channel →