Short Definition
A multimodal model can process or generate more than one kind of data, such as text, images, audio, or video.
Intuition
Instead of treating every modality as a separate system, the model connects different forms of information in one shared reasoning process.
Technical Definition
A multimodal model maps multiple input or output modalities into compatible representations for joint training, inference, or generation.
Example
A model can read a chart image and answer a text question about the trend.
Common Misunderstandings
Multimodal input does not mean every modality is equally strong.
A model may accept images and audio while still only producing text.