The Rise of Foundation Models: Opportunities, Technology, Applications, Challenges, Recent Trends, and Future Directions

Foundation models (FMs) have become a paradigm shift in the field of artificial intelligence, allowing one large-scale pretrained model to be customized for a broad set of downstream tasks using very little task-specific data. These models, which include GPT, CLIP, BERT, and vision transformers, have altered the scope of transfer learning and multimodal understanding and are built on top of enormous datasets and self-supervised learning. The paper provides a broad view of the modern state of foundation models, with an emphasis on their technological foundation, training, and cross-domain use in fields like natural language processing, computer vision, healthcare, robotics and scientific discovery. We also explore the main opportunities that FMs offer, as well as state-of-the-art methods and techniques for the development of foundation models. we discuss their applications in natural language processing, computer vision, healthcare, etc. Furthermore, their limitations and challenges are also investigated. Lastly, future prospects are discussed so that professionals and scientists obtain a better understanding of the importance of foundation models for addressing their research goals.