Multimodal Models and Their Importance

Multimodal models aim to allow large language models to understand visual information. With the increasing prevalence of visual media in society, image inputs can provide a richer training data set. On the output side, models like Gemini can natively generate images, which opens up new possibilities for creative acts and information processing. By separating generation and information processing, multimodal models can follow an encoder-decoder architecture, offering more versatility compared to decoder-only models.