Multimodal LLMs pursuing AGI now

By WANG XIN in Shanghai | China Daily | Updated: 2024-07-17 09:40 Participants visit the exhibition area of the 2024 China Internet Conference in Beijing, capital of China, July 9, 2024. Multimodal large language models have made substantial advances over the past year, and the practical application of such models is heading in the direction of pursuing artificial general intelligence, with diverse vertical industrial large models and AI agents emerging, said experts at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which wrapped up on July 6 in Shanghai. It can directly understand and train various types of data including audio, video, images and text," said Xu Peng, vice-president of the group, who regards such native multimodal capabilities as the "right path to achieving artificial general intelligence" as they will enable LLMs to interact like humans. Hu Shiwei, co-founder and president of Chinese AI company 4Paradigm, said the positioning of such large models as the new "infrastructure" in the future is a certainty. In addition to developing vertical large models, many companies and developers are also using MaaS — a type of cloud-based service that offers users access to machine-learning models to develop AI applications.