AI RESEARCH
The End of the Foundation Model Era: Open-Weight Models, Sovereign AI, and Inference as Infrastructure
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2604.06217v1 Announce Type: cross The foundation model era -- roughly 2020 to 2025 -- is over. The forces that defined it have inverted. Open source models have reached frontier performance while inference costs approach zero, exposing what was always structurally true: pre-