Nyckel blog
ModernBERT: Surprisingly Ineffective for Transfer Learning
ModernBERT is benchmarked across 146 datasets, and proves to be the worst performing model.
Oscar Beijbom
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ModernBERT: Surprisingly Ineffective for Transfer Learning
27 Feb 2025
ModernBERT is benchmarked across 146 datasets, and proves to be the worst performing model.
How Nyckel is Redefining AutoML
20 Feb 2025
Nyckel is redefining AutoML with a new approach to model development - transfer learning-based AutoML on AWS Lambda.
DINOv2: Benchmarking Performance Across 117 Datasets
29 Jan 2025
DINOv2, a self-supervised vision transformer by Meta AI, is benchmarked across 117 datasets, revealing its strengths and limitations in image classification
11 Roboflow Alternatives & Competitors
02 Dec 2024
Roboflow is a great brand - but this articles dives into their alternatives & competitors.
Classification using LLMs: best practices and benchmarks
10 Sep 2024
LLM-powered classification is quick and easy, but not very accurate. Transfer learning does significantly better but requires training data and more development work. AutoML sites like Nyckel offers the best of both worlds: superior accuracy with the ease of LLM powered zero-shot classification.
ChatGPT Alternatives for Classification
06 Sep 2024
ChatGPT and other LLMs work well for generative AI and many classification use cases. But they aren't always ideal. This article covers the pros/cons of using ChatGPT for classification.
Nyckel and Contextual join forces to make building an AI workflow even easier
28 Aug 2024
Customers of Contextual can now use Nyckel’s platform to categorize content and then use that information in subsequent business decisions.
Retailhub auto-tags hundreds of thousands of products using Nyckel
16 Aug 2024
Retailhub automates web store discoverability by auto-tagging products by category and metadata
Calibrating LLM classification confidences
08 Aug 2024
LLMs are often used to classify text content, achieving strong zero-shot accuracy. However, the classification confidences tend to be unreliable. Incorrect classifications are often assigned high confidence, and vice versa. In this post we look at two methods for inferring classification confidences from LLMs, and show how to (mostly) fix the confidence estimates using post-hoc calibration.
LinkedClient builds highly-accurate sales intent engine in just minutes
19 Jun 2024
LinkedClient used Nyckel to quickly build a feature that analyzes sales intent in emails and Linkedin messages.
How much training data is needed for classification?
24 May 2024
How much training data do you need to train a solid image or text classifier? Not as much as you'd think!
Introducing Multimodal Classification
15 May 2024
Nyckel is proud to announce the launch of a new function type - multimodal classification.
Free Confusion Matrix Creator
03 May 2024
A confusion matrix is a great way of visualizing your machine learning classification models. This tool makes it easy to build them.
Logo Detection: How to Build a Logo Detector
05 Apr 2024
Logo detection allows you to detect how your brand logo is being used and where. This article explains what logo detection is and how to build your own logo detector.
How to Map Job Titles to Departments Within Your CRM
01 Apr 2024
How to use natural language processing to easily map a contact's title to their department within your CRM.
What Is Text Classification? The Definitive 2025 Guide
04 Mar 2024
Text classification is the process of dividing text into different groups based on its content. Learn more about text classification in this article.
What Is Image Classification? The Definitive 2025 Guide
07 Feb 2024
Image classification is the process of dividing entire images into different groups based on their content. Learn more about image classification in this article.
Image Classification vs. Object Detection: Key Differences & How to Choose
01 Feb 2024
Image classification and object detection are two popular types of computer vision. We outline the differences and how to choose between them.
8 Best Image Recognition APIs You Can Train With Your Own Data
24 Jan 2024
Image recognition APIs automate the process of labeling images. Learn about the 8 best image recognition APIs available.
Build a Custom Food Image Recognition Classifier in 5 Steps
16 Jan 2024
Food image recognition makes it simple to label food items in your images. Learn more about food image recognition and how to build a custom classifier with Nyckel.
How to Easily Create a Document Classification Machine Learning Function
04 Jan 2024
Document classification makes it easier to label, sort, and retrieve various types of documents. See how easy it is to manage your business documents with Nyckel.
A Quick Guide to Remote Sensing Image Classification (+ How to Build a Classifier)
28 Dec 2023
Image classification can help us make sense of vast amounts of remote sensing data. Learn how to easily build a remote sensing image classifier with Nyckel.
5 Steps to Build a Custom Car Identifier in Minutes
15 Dec 2023
A custom car identifier enables you to quickly and accurately label images of cars with their make, model, and color. Learn how to build a car identifier with Nyckel.
Nyckel Is Proud to Announce Our Integration With Zapier
14 Dec 2023
Use Zapier to integrate with Nyckel's classification functions. The integration allows you to import, train, and classify from thousands of data sources.
PyTorch Image Classification: A Step-by-Step Guide (+ An Alternative Method)
17 Nov 2023
Learn how to build an image classification model with PyTorch and get introduced to Nyckel as an alternative. Identify the best fit for you based on your requirements and ML expertise.
Nyckel vs. Keras Image Classification Comparison
17 Nov 2023
Learn how to build an image classification model with Keras and get introduced to Nyckel as an alternative. Identify the best fit for you based on your requirements and ML expertise.
What Is Image Recognition? (And How Does It Differ From Image Classification?)
09 Nov 2023
Image recognition uses AI to identify patterns in images. But its means is vague, which causes confusion. Learn more about what image recognition really means.
Introducing Invoke Capture - Automatically Gather Important Data to Improve Your Model
12 Oct 2023
With Nyckel's invoke capture feature, we automatically and intelligently capture data from your deployed models for your team to review and annotate in Nyckel's dashboard.
AI Image Detector: Can You Use Image Classification to Spot the Fakes?
11 Sep 2023
We build an AI image detector to see how accurately an image classification function can spot AI-generated images. Learn more and build a classifier of your own.
End-to-End AutoML: Your AutoML Platform Should Span the Entire ML Development Lifecycle
30 Jun 2023
And end-to-end AutoML platform that handles all aspects of the ML development lifecycle offers significant benefits when compared to AutoML platforms that only do model training.
What's Best for Content Moderation? Blacklists vs. Pre-Trained ML vs. Custom ML (A Benchmark)
30 Apr 2023
Comparing accuracy of blacklist, pre-trained & custom-trained ML models for content moderation using a public Kaggle toxicity dataset.
Why Narrow AI is Better Than GPT-4 For Machine Learning-Driven Decisions
19 Apr 2023
Learn why products that can spring up narrow AI models trained for specific tasks outperform GPT-4 for ML-driven decisions.
Are Bounding Boxes Necessary for Object Detection?
21 Mar 2023
Are bounding boxes necessary for object detection? We experiment to discover whether center pointing or bounding boxes are more efficient.
Multiclass vs Multilabel Classification: A 2025 Guide
21 Nov 2022
Understanding the difference between multiclass vs multilabel classification is important before building out your model. This article dives into what they are and when to use each.
How to Map Job Titles to Departments with Capsule
19 Mar 2024
Use natural language processing and Capsule to easily map a contact's title to their respective department.
Pretrained Classifiers - March Update
15 Mar 2024
With Nyckel's pretrained classifiers, you can launch your own image and text classification models even faster.
Pretrained Classifiers - Feb Update
15 Feb 2024
With Nyckel's pretrained classifiers, you can launch your own image and text classification models even faster.
Using AI-Powered Image Classification to Fight Climate Change
31 Jan 2024
Image classification is proving to be a great way to fight climate change. Learn more about how exactly it's doing that.
Content Moderation Pretrained Classifiers
25 Jan 2024
With Nyckel's content moderation pretrained classifiers, you can moderate your text and images in just minutes.
Customized Auto-Tagging for Digital Asset Management
25 Oct 2023
AI auto-tagging of digital assets enables search, discovery, and content-based workflows. Discover how custom models can be trained in minutes with no AI expertise.
Even More Pretrained Classifiers From Nyckel
02 Oct 2023
With Nyckel's pretrained classifiers, you can launch your own image and text classification models even faster.
Nyckel's Ad Tech Pretrained Classifiers
15 Sep 2023
With Nyckel's pretrained classifiers for ad tech, you can launch your own image and text classification models even faster.
Hierarchical Image Classification vs. Flat Classification: What Does Your ML Task Need?
28 Aug 2023
We explain the differences between hierarchical image classification and flat and make the case for why a flat structure is often the better choice.
9 Must-Have Features for Your AutoML Platform: A Comprehensive Guide
22 Aug 2023
The AutoML platform you choose should do more than train a model. Learn what 9 things you should look for when conducting an AutoML tools comparison.
Introducing Nyckel Pretrained Classifiers
12 Aug 2023
With Nyckel's pretrained classifiers, you can launch your own image and text classification models even faster.
Discriminative vs. Generative AI: Which Should You Build Into Your Product?
28 Jul 2023
If you’re considering building AI into your product, it’s important to know the difference between generative and discriminative AI. We dive into the differences and the pros and cons of each.
What is AutoML? A Comprehensive Guide & What It Means for Product Teams
29 Jun 2023
In this post we look at AutoML, explain what it is and how it works, and discuss how it can benefit product teams trying to build AI-enabled products and features.
Guide to Computer Vision for Non-ML Experts
28 Jun 2023
The complex nature of computer vision often holds companies back from implementing it in their businesses. This guide shares what you need to know about computer vision.
Pet Media Group saves $120k annually with AI content moderation
09 Jun 2023
Pet Media Group uses Nyckel's image classification to moderate pet listings to ensure they meet animal welfare policies. Using Nyckel has resulted in $120K in annual savings.
Image Classification Benchmark: Google, AWS, Hugging Face & Nyckel
31 May 2023
In this image classification benchmark, we compare leading AutoML provides on model performance, training time, ablation, latency & throughput of model inference, and developer experience.
Computer Vision SaaS Landscape: Comparison of the Top 9 Players
17 May 2023
We compare nine leading computer vision SaaS providers on functionality, model creation time, performance, market positioning, and pricing.
Google Cloud Vision API Class List: Can We Reverse-Engineer to Find the List?
30 Apr 2023
Google provides a pre-trained computer vision model that tags images with labels based on image contents. In this post, we try to reverse-engineer the labels list.
How to Classify Time Series Signals With Computer Vision: Kaggle Whale Example
31 Mar 2023
Learn how to use image classification to classify time series signals, and in this case, audio recordings. No ML expertise required. You'll see how to process the audio into images and how to use Nyckel to train an image classification function in minutes.
Glossary of Computer Vision Function Types
21 Mar 2023
Various types of computer vision can help you identify, categorize, and search among millions of images in just a few moments. Discover the most common types of computer vision.
9 Ways to Use a Data Engine to Improve Your ML Model
01 Mar 2023
You can improve ML systems in two ways: better models or better data. Learn how to improve your data by finding and annotating hard-to-classify cases.
28 Practical Computer Vision Use Cases
27 Feb 2023
Learn about 28 practical computer vision use cases that enable companies to automate repetitive tasks or achieve things they couldn’t otherwise.
A Quick Guide to Semantic Image Search (with Examples)
24 Feb 2023
Semantic image search enables users to search a database of images quickly. Discover 11 practical use cases that support a better user experience.
Pulse for Good Uses ML to Turn Cumbersome System into Showstopping Product Feature
09 Feb 2023
Pulse for Good uses Nyckel to filter and categorize feedback from people from vulnerable populations so human service providers can better meet their needs.
Gardyn Reduces Workload by 70%, Grows 2x After Implementing Computer Vision
07 Feb 2023
Gardyn uses Nyckel’s computer vision functions to monitor its customers’ home plant growing systems, significantly reducing Gardyn’s workload while scaling up.
What Features Does Your Manual Content Moderation Tool Need?
16 Jan 2023
Even the most sophisticated content moderation tools aren't perfect solutions and require some level of manual review. We outline important manual review features.
The Ever-Growing Landscape of Content Moderation AI Platforms
04 Jan 2023
Learn about the similarities and differences between 9 high-performing content moderation AI platforms to choose the one that’s best for your business.
How Reddit Could Use Machine Learning to Better Moderate Subreddits
30 Dec 2022
Could online communities like Reddit use machine learning instead of human moderators for content moderation? We experimented with Nyckel's image classifier.
Service Oriented Design Applies to ML Too
07 Dec 2022
Service oriented design applied to machine learning will help manage ML complexity and build scalable organizations. Learn why.
Smarter, Faster, Automated Image Organization
10 Nov 2022
Nyckel's real-time API for custom machine learning is a game-changing to for digital asset management. Here is why.
Best practices for AI content moderation
09 Nov 2022
How do you train, configure, integrate, and monitor an AI-based content moderation system such that it gives your users the best experience while protecting your bottom line?
How to Approach Multilingual Content Moderation
07 Nov 2022
A lot of the internet's content is in non-mainstream languages. We look at some things to consider when building content moderation models for multi-lingual content.
Why Content Moderation is Important for Your Business
06 Nov 2022
Some examples of how content moderation can benefit your business in unexpected ways.
What is class-balance drift, and why does it matter for content moderation?
31 Oct 2022
Class-balance drift can degrade your auto content-moderation system. We look at what it is, how to track it, and what to do when it occurs.
How What’s That Charge 4x’d It's Revenue Using Nyckel Auto-Moderation
30 Oct 2022
What's That Charge uses Nyckel to automate its content moderation, improving the site's user experience and increasing WTC's revenue.
Same Same But Different: Content Moderation at Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit
24 Oct 2022
Discover the similarities and differences in content moderation policies of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit in this in-depth comparison.
Whac-a-Spammer - How to Deal with Bots on Your Site
09 Oct 2022
Learn the tools, tips, and tricks to prevent bots from taking over your site.
The Long Tail of Content Moderation Use-Cases
18 Sep 2022
Beyond Spam, NSFW and violence are a long tail of situations that require content moderation across gaming, dating, e-commerce and children's platforms.
What is Content Moderation?
16 Sep 2022
Content Moderation is critical when hosting user generated content. We break down the basic concepts and solutions.
4 Steps to Improved Content Moderation
11 Sep 2022
Learn how to improve your content moderation through blacklists and regular expressions, through pre-trained AIs, to custom AI that learns from your data.
Building a Recommender system using the Nyckel API.
10 Sep 2022
We break down the components of a Recommender system into Collaborative, Content and Hybrid filters. We then show how ot set this up using the Nyckel API.
Content Moderation using SurgeAI's Toxicity Dataset
02 Sep 2022
Learn how to train a Nyckel text classification model for content moderation using SurgeAI's toxicity dataset.
Taimi Cuts Content Moderation Time by 3x and Slashes Costs 10x Using Nyckel
09 Aug 2022
Taimi used Nyckel’s text classification API to increase curation coverage and accuracy and reduce latency over time with its auto-retrain. Read more.
How SPYSCAPE Added Magic Into Their AR Game Using Nyckel
09 Aug 2022
Using Nyckel ML FaaS, SPYSCAPE trained and deployed an image classification function, used as a key feature of the Augmented Reality in-game experience.
How Startup Accelerator Gust Trained a Custom Spam Filter using Nyckel
03 Aug 2022
Gust used Nyckel to train a custom AI spam filter. The new filter is 95% accurate and reduced their curation workload, while improving site quality.
IAB Classification of Text and Images Using Machine Learning
12 Jul 2022
IAB is a content taxonomy that is used by content publishers to organize their content in a consistent way. In this post we show you how to classify text and image content into IAB categories without any labeled data.
A Quick Look at Text Search Functions
26 May 2022
See some of the creative ways to add smarts to your application with Text Search
Custom AI-Assisted Content Moderation
30 Apr 2022
Online communities need content moderation to thrive, but the diversity of the internet is not fully served by general purpose content moderation APIs. We lay out the need for custom AI-assisted content moderation, look at what such a moderation pipeline would look like, and show how Nyckel makes it significantly easier to build such a pipeline.
Introducing Nyckel Image Search Functions
29 Apr 2022
Nyckel Image Search functions enable cross-modal semantic search of images and text using the latest Deep Learning technology. Get started with a few simple API commands.
ML is Just a Developer Tool
29 Apr 2022
Even with massive advances, Machine Learning should still be considered one tool of many in a developers' toolchain; not a panacea.
Machine Learning on Tabular Data with Nyckel
14 Jan 2022
Nyckel releases a new feature to create Machine Learning models for tabular data in minutes.
Nyckel Accepted to Y Combinator (W22)
03 Jan 2022
Nyckel has been accepted to Y Combinator batch of Winter 2022!
Machine Learning is Still Too Hard for Software Engineers
02 Jan 2022
Machine Learning has made huge strides in the last few decades, but it remains largely inaccessible to the average developer. This post examines some of the reasons why.
A top 3% score in the Kaggle Titanic Challenge using Transformers
25 Oct 2021
In this post we show how to make a top 3% submission on the Kaggle Titanic Challenge using Transformers
Local Development and Validation of Nuget Packages
19 Oct 2021
Learnings from setting up a local development workflow for developing and validating nuget packages
AutoML benchmark: Nyckel vs Google vs Huggingface
08 Jun 2021
A comparison of accuracy, training times, and invoke latencies for three major AutoML engines
AutoML Comment Moderation in a Rails App
12 May 2021
Using machine learning to help curate user content
Add Image Classification Using Machine Learning to a Web App With a Single Line of Code
28 Apr 2021
Inspired by a scene from HBO's Silicon Valley, I decided to build a website that identifies whether a photo is of a hot dog.
How to Add Custom Image Classification To Your Application Using Machine Learning (The Easy Way!)
06 Apr 2021
It’s often valuable to be able to programmatically classify an image into a category. This post explains how you can use Nyckel to do that in minutes.