Summary and Outlook

Abstract

AbstractFoundation Models emerged as a new paradigm in sequence interpretation that can be used for a large number of tasks to understand our environment. They offer the remarkable property of combining sensory input (sound, images, video) with symbolic interpretation of text and may even include action and DNA sequences. We briefly recap the process of pre-training, fine-tuning or prompting of Foundation Models and summarize their main properties. For the different application areas presented in the book, we summarize the performance levels of the models and delineate different promising economic applications. A section is devoted to discussing the potential harm that can be caused by Foundation Models, including bias, fake news, but also possible economic monopolies and unemployment. There is an urgent need for a legal regulation of the construction and deployment of these models. The last section considers advanced artificial intelligence systems and the shortcomings of current systems. Foundation Models have significantly improved performance in recent years and have the potential to reduce the gap to a truly general AI.