Spent 3 days trying to train a custom AI model for my small shop

I run a little vintage store in Portland and thought I could train a model to recognize items from my inventory photos. After 72 hours of tweaking datasets and parameters, it still couldn't tell a 1950s lamp from a toaster. Has anyone actually got a custom model working without a computer science degree?

2 comments

2 Comments

michael_jenkins391mo ago

Are you sure it's the model and not just trying to shove 70 years of weird items into one system?

amy9741mo ago

But what if the problem isn't your model, it's that you're expecting too much from a single tool? You're asking it to learn the difference between a 1950s lamp and a toaster, but those things share a lot of similar shapes and materials. Maybe you should break your inventory into smaller groups first, like furniture, electronics, decor. That way the model only has to learn within each group, not across all of them. I've seen people get good results by training separate models for each category instead of one big mess. It takes more work upfront but the accuracy jumps way up.