Foundation Models and Open-Vocabulary Vision Entered the Toolchain, Not the Factory Floor

Relationship to Annual Outlook: Refines the Outlook

11/24/2025

Summary

Evidence through November suggests foundation models, VLMs and open-vocabulary segmentation are becoming more visible in the vision AI toolchain. However, the evidence is still concentrated around model workflows, benchmarking, retrieval and segmentation—not broad industrial factory deployment.

Supporting Evidence

Evidence Base

28 Feb 2025 — SAM 2 + GPT-4o: Cascading Foundation Models via Visual Prompting
https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2025/02/sam-2-gpt-4o-cascading-foundation-models-via-visual-prompting-part-2
12 Mar 2025 — Building a Simple VLM-based Multimodal Information Retrieval System with NVIDIA NIM
https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2025/03/building-a-simple-vlm-based-multimodal-information-retrieval-system-with-nvidia-nim
14 Mar 2025 — Scalable Video Search: Cascading Foundation Models
https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2025/03/scalable-video-search-cascading-foundation-models
21 Mar 2025 — Video Understanding: Qwen2-VL, An Expert Vision-language Model
https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2025/03/video-understanding-qwen2-vl-an-expert-vision-language-model
24 Nov 2025 — SAM3: A New Era for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Edge AI
https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2025/11/sam3-a-new-era-for-open%e2%80%91vocabulary-segmentation-and-edge-ai

Why It Matters

This preserves the 2025 Outlook’s caution. Foundation-model techniques are becoming relevant to vision workflows, but the CSV evidence does not support treating them as mature industrial deployment infrastructure yet.

Technology Themes

Foundation Models, Vision-Language Models, Open-Vocabulary Segmentation, Edge AI

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