Outlook 32: Foundation Models for Telecom: Paving the Way for Self-Built Networks

Outlook 32: Foundation Models for Telecom: Paving the Way for Self-Built Networks

The recent progress around foundation models opened a new era in many Machine Learning (ML) applications. One specific type of foundation models, Large Languages Models (LLMs), created a technology leap in human like text understanding and generation with repercussions that we are only starting to grasp. ChatGPT and its successors/competing solutions attracted remarkable attention and are being used extensively for language learning, chatbot and virtual assistant, content creation and optimization. In this paper we discuss the application of foundation models in the Telecom domain. This area was not among the first applications, but we believe that it will take much more importance in the future. We start by discussing the history of foundation models and their applications. In particular, we discuss the newly launched LLMs like ChatGPT, LLaMa and PaLM2 and how they revolutionised many applications.