Foundation Model

In one sentenceA large, general-purpose model that many different products are built on top of.

What it means

Foundation models are trained once, at enormous cost, on broad data. Thousands of companies then build apps on top of them through an API, adding their own interface, prompts and data.

GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Llama are foundation models. Many AI tools you use every day are powered by one of them behind the scenes.

How to use it

• When evaluating an AI tool, ask which foundation model it uses. That tells you a lot about its quality and limits.
• A tool's value is usually in what it adds on top: your data, workflow, templates and integrations.

Related terms

LLM Model AI Wrapper Fine-Tuning