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Concept
Foundation models
Summary
A foundation model (also called base model) is a large machine learning (ML) model trained on a vast quantity of data at scale (often by self-supervised learning or semi-supervised learning) such that it can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. Foundation models have helped bring about a major transformation in how artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built, such as by powering prominent chatbots and other user-facing AI. The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence's (HAI) Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) popularized the term.
Early examples of foundation models were pre-trained language models (LMs) including Google's BERT and various early GPT foundation models, which notably includes OpenAI's "GPT-n" series. Such broad models can in turn be used for task and/or domain specific models using targeted datasets of various kinds, such as medical codes.
Beyond text, several visual and multimodal foundation models have been producedincluding DALL-E, Flamingo, Florence and NOOR. Visual foundation models (VFMs) have been combined with text-based LLMs to develop sophisticated task-specific models. There is also Segment Anything by Meta AI for general image segmentation. For reinforcement learning agents, there is GATO by Google DeepMind.
The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence's (HAI) Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) coined the term "foundation model" in August 2021, tentatively referring to "any model that is trained on broad data (generally using self-supervision at scale) that can be adapted (e.g., fine-tuned) to a wide range of downstream tasks". This was based on their observation that existing overlapping terms were not adequate, submitting that "'(large) language model' was too narrow given [the] focus is not only language; 'self-supervised model' was too specific to the training objective; and 'pretrained model' suggested that the noteworthy action all happened after 'pretraining.
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