Instill Core vs. Lens Comparison Chart

Lens is Moondream’s official fine-tuning service, designed to turn a general vision-language model into a highly specialized system tailored to a specific task. It provides a simple, structured workflow where users start by collecting a small dataset of images relevant to their use case, then fine-tune the model through an API using techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning, and finally deploy the customized model either through the cloud or locally with Photon. It is built around the idea that Moondream begins as a general model trained on broad, public data, and fine-tuning adapts it to understand the exact products, documents, categories, or internal information that matter to a business, significantly improving accuracy and reliability for that domain. Lens is designed for production scenarios where performance matters, enabling teams to achieve large gains in accuracy with minimal data by teaching the model to master a defined task.