ETH Zurich

ETH Zurich is Switzerland's leading technical university and a globally recognized center for AI research and development. The institution conducts extensive work on AI safety, ethics, and governance frameworks that inform regulatory approaches across Europe and internationally. Its research outputs and policy recommendations carry significant weight in shaping how enterprises approach responsible AI implementation and compliance.

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ResearchGlobal2026-08-16

Training Data, Not Fine-Tuning, Sets the Hard Capability Ceiling for AI Models

Researchers from MPI for Intelligent Systems, ELLIS Institute Tuebingen, and ETH Zurich trained language models on a corpus filtered to U.S. elementary-school curriculum standards to test what limits model capability. Their findings show that scaling, fine-tuning, and in-context learning all fail to push performance meaningfully beyond what the pretraining data contained. The study provides empirical grounding for the principle that training data scope is the primary determinant of model capability.

training data transparency capability boundaries model auditability AI safety research vendor due diligence pre-deployment validation MPI for Intelligent Systems ETH Zurich