Your Brain Already Does Multimodal AI. It Took Us 10 Years And 7 Breakthroughs To Copy It.
Last Updated on January 2, 2026 by Editorial Team
Author(s): DrSwarnenduAI
Originally published on Towards AI.
See cat. Hear “cat”. Read “cat”. Same concept. Here’s every innovation that made GPT-4V possible.
Close your eyes. I say “cat.”

The article discusses the advancements in AI, particularly focusing on the development of multimodal AI capabilities that mimic human processing of sensory information. It outlines the timeline of key innovations over a decade, including Word2Vec, attention mechanisms, transformers, BERT, and CLIP, which collectively contribute to creating AI systems that can interpret and understand diverse forms of data—text, images, and audio—simultaneously. The text emphasizes the necessity of these innovations in achieving the current state of AI, exemplified by systems like GPT-4V and outlines how these technologies process information in a unified manner, aiming to bridge the gap between human-like understanding and machine learning. The closing thoughts reflect on future possibilities for AI to simulate human perceptions more closely.
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