Foundation Model

A foundation model is a large AI model trained on broad data at scale that can be adapted to a wide range of tasks.

What is Foundation Model?

The term was coined by Stanford researchers in 2021. Many applications are built on the same few foundation models, so their flaws can spread widely. The EU AI Act uses the term general-purpose AI model for broadly the same concept.

How it works

The model is pre-trained with self-supervised learning on large datasets and then adapted through fine-tuning, prompting or retrieval.

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