What happens when AI can see, hear, and read all at once?

The answer

Multimodal AI models process and generate multiple types of data - text, images, audio, and video - within a single unified architecture. GPT-4, released in March 2023, could accept both text and image inputs, while Google's Gemini (December 2023) was natively multimodal from the ground up, trained simultaneously on text, images, audio, and video. These models can describe photographs, answer questions about charts, generate images from text, and even reason across modalities. The key technical challenge is aligning representations from different data types into a shared embedding space where concepts have consistent meanings.