Foundation Model
A large pre-trained model (LLM, vision, or multimodal) intended as a general-purpose substrate that downstream apps consume via prompting, fine-tuning, or agent scaffolding. Under the EU AI Act these are General-Purpose AI (GPAI) models and their providers carry specific obligations.
Related terms
- Large Language Model (LLM)
A type of AI model trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like text. Examples include GPT-4, Claude, and Llama. LLMs power many GenAI applications.
- Fine-tuning
Continuing to train a pretrained model on a task-specific dataset to change its behavior, style, or domain knowledge. Techniques range from full fine-tuning (all weights) to parameter-efficient methods like LoRA and QLoRA that update only small adapter layers.
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Where this fits
Foundation Model is part of the AI Fundamentals vocabulary used in the Generative AI Maturity Framework. See the full glossary for the complete set of 149 defined terms, or take the free maturity assessment to see where your organisation stands.