Model Collapse
The degradation of model quality that results from training successive generations on synthetic data produced by earlier models rather than fresh human-generated data. A structural concern for the LLM ecosystem as AI-generated content saturates the open web.
Related terms
- 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.
- Distillation
Training a smaller "student" model to reproduce the outputs (or intermediate representations) of a larger "teacher" model. Common technique for compressing frontier-model capability into smaller, cheaper models suitable for high-volume or on-device use.
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Where this fits
Model Collapse 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.