AI Vocabulary · 01 The Model
What is Foundation Model?
A large, general-purpose model trained on broad data that many different products and tasks are built on top of.
A foundation model is a big model trained once, at great cost, on a very broad mix of data, so that it can be adapted to many tasks: writing, coding, summarising, translating, analysing images. Most large language models are foundation models.
Companies rarely build their own. Instead they use a foundation model through an app or API and adapt it with instructions, context or fine-tuning. The EU calls the largest of these models general-purpose AI models and sets specific duties for their providers.
Why it matters for you
Most AI products you buy are a layer on top of someone else's foundation model. When the foundation model changes, gets more expensive or is retired, the product on top changes too.
Own it
Ask every AI vendor which foundation model they use and whether they can switch. Your own value sits in the layer you control: your data, your context, your workflows.
Where it comes from
The term was coined in August 2021 by researchers at Stanford in the report On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models, led by Rishi Bommasani. They chose "foundation" to stress that these models are central to many applications yet incomplete on their own: every use builds on top of them. Their examples at the time were BERT, GPT-3 and DALL-E.
Related
Your AI Learning Hub
Learn the whole AI Vocabulary, step by step, and build with it. Build it. Own it.