Computer Vision Interview Questions #3 - The Low Initial Loss Trap

Why a Softmax loss of 0.05 at step zero doesn’t mean your model is brilliant — it means your training pipeline is broken.

You’re in a Machine Learning Engineer interview at OpenAI and the interviewer drops this scenario:

“You kick off training for a Softmax classifier on CIFAR-10 (10 classes). In the very first iteration, your loss reads 0.05. Is this good news?”

Most candidates say: “That’s amazing! The model is converging incredibly fast. The data pipeline must be super cl…