6. Transfer Learning Is Your Competitive Edge

Instead of training from scratch, the book teaches how to leverage pretrained models like ResNet, Inception, or EfficientNet. By freezing base layers and fine-tuning only the top, you can adapt powerful vision models to small, custom datasets. Géron shows how to preprocess images, load pretrained weights, and gradually unfreeze layers to improve generalization. This is a gold standard in production ML: it reduces cost, time, and training data needs. Pretrained models aren’t shortcuts — they’re the culmination of learned visual hierarchies that you can repurpose with precision.