Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A model whose training run exceeded 10^25 FLOPs and that is subject to systemic-risk obligations under the EU AI Act.
- Is an instance
A frontier-lab model voluntarily disclosed to the UK AISI under the pre-deployment access agreement.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A 7B-parameter open-weight model usable on a single GPU.
- Not an instance
A task-specific classifier trained for one application.
Editorial commentary
The term 'frontier model' came into widespread use through 2023-2024 policy discussions (UK AI Safety Institute, US Executive Order 14110) as a proxy for 'most capable model class', often via training-compute thresholds (e.g., > 10^25 or > 10^26 FLOPs). The definition is intentionally moving so that the term tracks the technological frontier.
References
- UK AI Safety Institute publications; US Executive Order 14110 (2023); EU AI Act systemic-risk-model provisions.
Also known as
frontier AI model
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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