Geo‐Foundation Models

As a group of task‐agnostic pretrained large‐scale neural network models that can be later adapted to numerous downstream tasks, foundation models have made a significant impact on academia, industry, and society. Meanwhile, several efforts have been made to develop foundation models for the geoscience domain. They are known as geo‐foundation models (GeoFMs). The necessary steps for GeoFM development were taken in the context of the uniqueness of geographic data and a collaborative effort among academia, industry, and society is necessary to develop a reliable, sustainable, and ethically aware framework.