Foundation Model Selection — Choose the Right Base Model

I will assess your application requirements and deliver a written foundation model selection report — comparing frontier models (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro) against open-weight models (Llama 3, Mistral, Qwen, DeepSeek) across capability, cost, privacy, latency, and customisability dimensions for your specific use case. Foundation model selection is the highest-leverage architectural decision in any AI application — it determines your cost structure, data privacy posture, customisation ceiling, and vendor dependency profile simultaneously, and changing it mid-project requires significant rework of prompt engineering, integration code, and evaluation infrastructure.

The report covers your use case capability requirements, privacy and data handling constraints, latency and throughput requirements, cost modelling at your expected usage volume, customisation needs assessment, and a clear recommendation with rationale for both primary and fallback model selection.