Glossary
Foundation Model
A large model trained on broad data that can be adapted to many downstream tasks.
Definition
A foundation model is a large-scale AI model trained on broad and diverse data — typically self-supervised on internet-scale corpora — that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks through prompting, fine-tuning, or retrieval. GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama are foundation models.
Context
The foundation-model paradigm shifted enterprise AI economics: instead of training a bespoke model per task, one general-purpose model is adapted many ways. This is why AI capability compounds so fast and why enterprise AI strategy is more about integration and orchestration than training.