Developing and understanding responsible foundation models.

What is a foundation model?

In recent years, a new successful paradigm for building AI systems has emerged: Train one model on a huge amount of data and adapt it to many applications. We call such a model a foundation model.

WHY DO WE CARE?

Foundation models (e.g., GPT-3) have demonstrated impressive behavior, but can fail unexpectedly, harbor biases, and are poorly understood. Nonetheless, they are being deployed at scale.

Our Mission

The Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) is an interdisciplinary initiative born out of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) that aims to make fundamental advances in the study, development, and deployment of foundation models.

We are an interdisciplinary group of faculty, students, post-docs, and researchers spanning 10+ departments who have a shared interest in studying and building responsible foundation models.

CRFM has the following thrusts:

  • Research. We will conduct interdisciplinary research that lays the groundwork of how foundation models should be built to make them more efficient, robust, interpretable, multimodal, and ethically sound.
  • Artifacts. We will train and release foundation models, code, tools, and also ensure that the full training pipeline is reproducible and scientifically rigorous.
  • Community. We will invite universities, companies, and non-profits to convene and work together to develop a set of professional norms for how to responsibly train and deploy foundation models.