Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A 70B-parameter LLM adapted by prompting to 30+ downstream tasks without further training.
- Is an instance
A vision-language foundation model fine-tuned to radiology, agriculture, and remote sensing applications.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A task-specific small classifier (e.g., a logistic regression for spam).
- Not an instance
A handcrafted rule-based system.
Editorial commentary
Bommasani et al. (2021) named foundation models to describe the emerging pattern of training a single very large model and then adapting it to many tasks, in contrast to the prior pattern of one model per task. Foundation models include LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Mistral families), vision-language models (CLIP, Flamingo), and increasingly multimodal models.
References
- Bommasani et al., 'On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models' (Stanford CRFM report, 2021).
Also known as
FM
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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