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Equation 4 · Part 1 · The Hardest Unsolved Problems in Multimodal AI

Symbol N_tok

Ntok=HP⋅WP,N_{\mathrm{tok}} = \frac{H}{P} \cdot \frac{W}{P},
NtokN_{\mathrm{tok}}

What this part means

NtN_tok is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

Its job in the formula

NtN_tok is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.

The passage around this formula

…merely adding up, and it is worth making explicit because it exposes an assumption rather than a vague sense of difficulty. A vision transformer front end tokenises an image of height H and width W at patch size P into NtokN_{\mathrm{tok}} = HP\frac{H}{P} ⋅\cdot WP\frac{W}{P}, and a video of T sampled frames multiplies that by T again. Any fixed context budget therefore forces a three-way trade between spatial patch size, temporal sampling rate, and clip duration — coarsen the patches, subsample frames, or truncate the…

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Sources cited in the article section

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