Over the last few years, building an AI startup used to require “do-it-yourself AI,” which consisted of gathering training data, labeling it, architecting complex data transformations, tuning hyperparameters, and selecting the right model. It was a herculean task, similar in complexity to the workload of the Salesforce engineer above. But in the last year or two, foundation models have emerged as a time-saving shortcut that enable entrepreneurs to do more faster. These foundation models aren’t specific to particular AI use cases, but are largely general and have something to offer almost anyone. Entrepreneurs can now decouple parts of the training data and model (which comes pre-packaged in a foundation model) from the application layer, which we at Scale call a cognitive application.
