What Are Multimodal Models?

Introduction

A multimodal model is an AI system that can process more than one type of data, such as images, text, audio, or video. The key challenge is not simply accepting these inputs, but aligning them into a shared representation.

Why it matters

Visual question answering is a clear example: the model must read the question, inspect the image, and generate a grounded answer.

Minimal example

python
answer = model(image, question)
print(answer)

Takeaway

The strength of multimodal systems depends on how well they connect perception with language.