that the noteworthy action all happened after 'pretraining." The term "foundation model" was chosen over "foundational model" because "foundational" implies that these models provide fundamental principles in a way that "foundation" does not. The term vision-language model (VLM) is also used as a near-synonym.

As governments regulate foundation models, new legal definitions have emerged.
* In the United States, the now revoked Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence