foundation model

A very large pre-trained model trained on an enormous and diverse training set. A foundation model can do both of the following: - Respond well to a wide range of requests. - Serve as a base model for additional fine-tuning or other customization. In other words, a foundation model is already very capable in a general sense but can be further customized to become even more useful for a specific task.

Practitioners refer to foundation model when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.