Glossary
Foundation model — Glossary
A large pretrained model adaptable to many downstream tasks via prompting, tools, or fine-tuning.
Full definition
The term was popularized by Stanford CRFM’s foundation model report. Foundation models amortize expensive pretraining across many applications, concentrating both capability and systemic risk.
Adaptation surfaces include prompting, RAG, tool use, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Governance should cover the entire adaptation chain, not only the base model card.