I'm missing something. Shouldn't any llm that's 'natively multimodal' somehow include embeddings which are multi-modal? for ex here's googles blogpost on Gemini
Until now, the standard approach to creating multimodal models involved
training separate components for different modalities and then stitching them
together to roughly mimic some of this functionality. These models can
sometimes be good at performing certain tasks, like describing images, but
struggle with more conceptual and complex reasoning.
We designed Gemini to be natively multimodal, pre-trained from the start on
different modalities. Then we fine-tuned it with additional multimodal data to
further refine its effectiveness. This helps Gemini seamlessly understand and
reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing
multimodal models — and its capabilities are state of the art in nearly every
domain.
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