General-purpose AI
The 'CIOB Artificial Intelligence (AI) Playbook 2024', glossary of terms, published by the Chartered Institute of Building(CIOB) describes general-purpose AI as often referring to 'AI models that can be adapted to a wide range of applications.'
Foundation models are one example of these, which are machine learning models trained on a vast amount of data so that it can easily be adapted for a wide range of general tasks, including being able to generate outputs (generative AI). Another example are large language models which are a type of foundation model trained on vast amounts of text to carry out natural language processing tasks. on the other hand narrow AI, or weak AI are 'models designed to perform a specific task (such as speech recognition) and cannot be adapted to other tasks.'
see also The long expanding list of AI tools for building planning, design, construction and management.
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