Multimodal AI

Multimodal AI refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of processing and generating multiple types of content, such as text, images, audio, and video. Modern LLMs like GPT-4 Vision and Claude 3 can understand images alongside text, enabling new categories of applications.

Multimodal capabilities enable: image analysis and description, visual question answering, document understanding (OCR + comprehension), chart and diagram interpretation, visual reasoning tasks, and generating images from text descriptions.

For AI engineers, multimodal models expand what's possible in applications: processing PDFs with complex layouts, understanding screenshots for UI automation, analyzing visual data, and creating more natural human-AI interactions. Working with multimodal models involves: handling different input formats, understanding cost implications (images use many tokens), managing file uploads/encoding, and knowing the limitations of visual understanding.