What is multimodal AI?
Multimodal AI combines text, image, audio, and video in one model. GPT-4o and Gemini are examples. This article explains how it works and why it matters.
What is multimodality?
Multimodal AI is an AI system that can process and generate more than one type of data — text, images, audio, video, or code.
Examples
- GPT-4o — text, images, and audio in one model
- Gemini — designed as multimodal from the ground up
- Claude 3.5 — understands images and documents
- DALL-E, Midjourney — text-to-image
- Sora — text-to-video
How does it work?
Different modalities are converted to a shared representation space. Text is tokenized; images are divided into patches; audio is converted to spectrograms. All representations are processed by a shared transformer architecture.
Applications
- Medical image analysis combined with patient records
- Customer service understanding screenshots
- Accessibility tools describing images
- Video analysis for security
- Code generation based on a sketch
Author: Claude claude-sonnet-4-6