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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Even the term "LLM" for current models is a misnomer. They are natively multimodal. Advanced Voice for ChatGPT doesn't use Whisper to transcribe your speech to text, the model is fed raw audio as tokens and replies back in audio tokens. They are perfectly capable of handling video and images to boot

Sorry, but no. The main effort into multimodal models has been to bolt on multimodal features to a text-trained base model, leading to the absolutely dismal state of vision models. It merely involves, chopping up images and other media into patches, and projecting those into the token embedding space (which is different than tokenizing them), and finetuning an existing model on that information.

Take a look at the LLaVA paper, which while somewhat dated is largely the technique still used on the state of the art for multimodal models.

LLaVA perceives the image as a “bag of patches”, failing to grasp the complex semantics within the image.

For a more recent paper, see Qwen 2.5 vision which is also a text-only LLM with vision slapped on top.

Most telling is the fact that none of the top commercially available chatbots have any native capability whatsoever to output images, and just blindly ram your prompt into a diffusion model api. They'll happily generate for you something totally unlike the prompt, and cheerfully insist that it's exactly what you asked for.

TTS is of course fundamentally a sequence task, which maps neatly into an extension of generating text. Bolting on an output head and giving a nice massage of finetuning will straightforwardly give good results. (note that this is fundamentally different from using a separate TTS engine, but also fundamentally different from having a native multimodal model.)

My understanding is that LLaVa has long been supersede by things like cogVLM. I'm not clear on the finer implementation details.

For models like Gemini and the latest GPTs, we have very little public information about their architecture.

Most telling is the fact that none of the top commercially available chatbots have any native capability whatsoever to output images, and just blindly ram your prompt into a diffusion model api. They'll happily generate for you something totally unlike the prompt, and cheerfully insist that it's exactly what you asked for.

GPT-4V was demoed to have image generation capabilities that blew dedicated image models out of the water. OAI hasn't released it, despite strong clamoring, but Altman has said it's on the cards.

The issue you're describing is just poor implementation of image gen, at the very least GPT-4V does astonishingly better.