Foundational models refer to large language models (such as GPT series), BERT and others which are trained on a vast corpus of data and serve as the foundation for various NLP tasks (such as text generation, translation, sentiment analysis and more). They are the starting point for building specialized models for specific applications.

Some prominent scientists who contributed to NLP and ML research are:

Geoffrey Hinton: His work laid the foundation for modern deep learning techniques, including those used in foundational models.

Yoshua Bengio: His research has advanced our understanding of neural networks and their applications in NLP tasks.

Yann Lecun: His work on CNNs is well-known. It has applications in computer vision (CV). His contributions are useful in the development of foundational models.

Google Team, OpenAI Team: These teams played crucial roles in the development and advancement of foundational models such as GPT and BERT.