🌿 Orchid Genus ID — with calibrated species abstain

Upload an orchid photo. The model (orchid-clip-v8, a BioCLIP-2 ViT-L/14 fine-tune) embeds it and ranks it against 18,858 orchid species image centroids. Genus is the level it reliably nails (genus top-1 ≈ 0.94); species within a genus is genuinely hard. So a calibrated abstain shows a species only when it is confident — otherwise it gives you the genus and lists the species candidates as possibilities. The abstain holds shown-species precision at ~90% while still naming a species on ~57% of photos.

Why abstain? Across six independent extension attempts, genus structure in this embedding transfers and stays decodable while within-genus species identity hits a wall. Rather than emit a confident wrong binomial, this card serves the granularity the model actually earns. See the write-up.