It is widely admitted that the use of language in terms like formal language and language model tend to mislead neophytes, since they suggest the common-sense notion (roughly, e-language) rather than the narrow technical sense referring to a set of strings. Scholars at Stanford have been trying to push foundation model as an alternative to what were previously called large language models. But I don’t really like the implication—which I take to be quite salient—that such models ought to serve as the foundation for NLP, AI, whatever. I use large language models in my research, but not that often, and I actually don’t think they have to be part of every practitioner’s toolkit. I can’t help thinking that Stanford is trying to “make fetch happen”.