For years, artificial intelligence has mostly been associated with text: mostly chatbots along with search tools and recommendation systems. But we’re now way past AI being generative as it becomes capable of handling multiple things. Multimodal AI will now allow you to work with text as well as images and other media, sometimes all within the same interaction.
If your business is exploring AI generative systems, this new possibility opens up more ways to use artificial intelligence for tasks that involve different types of information.
Understanding multimodal AI
With multimodal AI, you get an AI system that can understand multiple types of data.
A traditional AI model might specialise in text where you type a question and it gives you a written response. Turn that into a multimodal platform and you can now work with several formats as it connects the information it receives from each one.
For example, you might upload an image and ask AI to explain what it sees. You could also give it a video and ask what happens during a certain scene. Since the model can consider different sources of information together, it gets more context before responding.
How multimodal AI works
To understand how multimodal AI works, it helps to look at how you understand what’s happening around you. Besides listening to words, you might take into account someone’s voice and expression, as well as what they’re doing all at once, right? Multimodal AI takes a similar approach by processing several types of data together.
When analysing a video, for instance, the AI could consider everything from the visuals and spoken dialogue to the background audio and text appearing on screen. Combining those details can help it understand the situation more fully compared to a traditional AI generative tool that can analyse only one part.
One model can handle multiple tasks
With multimodal models, you can handle different tasks without requiring a separate AI system for each one.
You could use the same model to turn speech into text and describe an image, or even answer questions about a video. Likewise, you can depend on it to generate content from a prompt. All this can make AI more flexible for your organisation, especially when you want to maximise artificial intelligence across different applications.
How multimodal AI generates output
Multimodal AI can produce different types of output depending on what you ask for. It could:
- Answer a question about an image in text.
- Generate an image from written instructions.
- Turn a story into a video.
- Produce audio that describes a scene.
Because the model can consider information across different formats, its response can reflect more of the context you provide.
Develop your own multimodal AI system
Our team at Cybersecurity Analytics can help you develop a multimodal AI generative system for your organisation. With our support, you can get a comprehensive solution that includes everything from model selection to security checks and ongoing monitoring.
Contact us today to discuss your AI requirements and get started.
