Large Tabular Models Excel Where LLMs Fail

IEEE Spectrum AI · 1 week ago

Large tabular models (LTMs) are a new class of AI foundation models designed to handle structured data in spreadsheets, where traditional LLMs fail due to their sequential nature and lack of deterministic outputs. Fundamental launched its LTM called NEXUS on February 5, 2026, with $275 million in funding and achieved adoption by Amazon Web Services, with competitors including Google's TabFM and research models like FlexTab also emerging. This shifts enterprise data analysis away from legacy machine learning algorithms like XGBoost toward pre-trained foundational models that require minimal task-specific engineering.