Has AI found a new Foundation?

They coined a new term, "Foundation Models" to characterize the new paradigm, joined forces in a "Center for Research on Foundation Models", and published the massive 212-page report "On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models." Although the term is new, the general approach is not. You train a big neural network (like the well-known GPT-3) on an enormous amount of data, and then you adapt ("fine-tune") the model to a bunch of more specific tasks (in the words of the report, "a foundation model ...[thus] serves as [part of] the common basis from which many task-specific models are built via adaptation"). The basic model thus serves as the "foundation" (hence the term) of AIs that carry out more specific tasks. The approach started to gather momentum in 2018, when Google developed the natural language processing model called BERT, and it became even more popular with the introduction last year of OpenAI's GPT-3.