01 / The Model
Foundation model
A large, general-purpose model trained on broad data that many products are built on top of. Most AI tools you buy are a foundation model plus someone else’s harness.
How you’ll hear it
“Who actually built the model inside this product?”
“A foundation model provider. The vendor built the product around it.”
Avoid
Assuming a vendor built the underlying model themselves.
The longer version
A foundation model is trained once, at great expense, and then adapted by many companies through instructions, retrieval or fine-tuning. When you buy an AI product, knowing which foundation model sits underneath tells you a lot about its strengths, its limits and your dependencies.