Vision-language models: LLaVA, GPT-4V and Gemini
CLIP showed that images and text can live in the same embedding space. Vision-language models (VLMs) take this further: they give a language model the ability to understand images — not just match them to captions, but answer detailed questions, reason about spatial relationships, read text in images, and describe complex scenes. GPT-4V, Gemini, and LLaVA all share the same high-level architecture: a visual encoder (usually CLIP-based), a projection layer, and a language model.