General Purpose & Frontier Models

Definition

Models that perform across multiple domains, tasks and modalities. This includes foundation and multimodal models, modular and routed architectures (such as a mixture-of-experts and routing systems), and models capable of interacting with (or being used by software systems for them to interact with) external tools, data sources or other agents to perform complex or multi-step tasks (linked to 2.3.3.5).

Examples

• Mixtral 8x7B (Mistral AI)
• DeepSeek-R1 (DeepSeek)
• PaLM-E (Google DeepMind)
• Flamingo (Google DeepMind)
• Kosmos-2 (Microsoft)
• AutoGen (Microsoft Research)
• LangGraph (LangChain).

Indicators

• Number of domestically developed models
• Number of papers published on model development by researchers working for Australian entities

Stocktake

• Artificial intelligence foundation models report. CSIRO. 2024. Accessed February 2026. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/ai/ai-foundation-models-report