Move over ChatGPT and DALL-E: Spreadsheet data is getting its own foundation machine learning model, allowing users to immediately make inferences abo

Foundation model for tabular data slashes training from hours to seconds

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2025-01-15 10:00:02

Move over ChatGPT and DALL-E: Spreadsheet data is getting its own foundation machine learning model, allowing users to immediately make inferences about new data points for data sets with up to 10,000 rows and 500 columns.

One commentator said the development could be "revolutionary" for the speed at which users can make predictions using tabular data.

Foundation models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT are pre-trained on vast data sets and provide a general basis for developers to build more specialist models without such extensive training.

A team led by Frank Hutter, professor of machine learning at the University of Freiburg, has developed a foundation model for tabular machine learning, which can make immediate inferences based on tables of data. Predictions based on tabular data – essentially spreadsheet data – are valuable in a wide variety of scenarios, from social media moderation to hospital decision-making.

"The authors' advance is expected to have a profound effect in many areas," said Duncan McElfresh, a senior data engineer at Stanford Health Care, part of Stanford University.