Synesthesia 2.0: The Multimodal AI Revolution

Himanshu Sharma
8 min readSep 19, 2024

How Machines Are Learning to See, Hear, and Understand Our World in Technicolor

Photo by Maxim Tolchinskiy on Unsplash

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, a new frontier is emerging that promises to revolutionize how machines perceive and interact with the world: multimodal AI. This cutting-edge technology is bridging the gap between different forms of data input, allowing AI systems to process and understand information across multiple modalities, including text, images, audio, and video.

What is Multimodal AI?

Multimodal AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that can integrate and process information from multiple types of input sources or “modalities.” Unlike traditional AI models that specialize in a single domain (such as text-only language models or image-only vision models), multimodal AI can seamlessly combine insights from various data types to form a more comprehensive understanding.

The key advantage of multimodal AI lies in its ability to mimic human-like perception and reasoning. Humans naturally integrate information from multiple senses to understand and interact with their environment. For instance, when we watch a movie, we simultaneously process visual scenes, dialogue, background music, and sometimes even subtitles. Multimodal AI aims to replicate this holistic…

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Himanshu Sharma

I write about my learnings in the field of Data Science, Visualization, Artificial Intelligence, etc.| Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/himanshusharmads/