GLOSSARY
Checkpoint
A saved snapshot of a model's weights — the file you download when you grab an open model, and the unit the community shares on hubs.
Training writes down its progress as checkpoints — full copies of the weights at a moment in time. The word migrated from engineering into community vocabulary: on Civitai, SeaArt or ModelScope, “a checkpoint” now colloquially means a complete fine-tuned image model (versus a LoRA, the small add-on), usually with example generations attached.
Checkpoints are also how model releases work: Llama, Qwen and FLUX each publish their weights as downloadable checkpoints you can run, quantize or fine-tune further. Sizes range from a couple of gigabytes to hundreds — which is why quantization and small-model variants matter for anyone without a data center.