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Equation 4 · Part 5 · The Hardest Unsolved Problems in Multimodal AI

=

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

What this part means

The expressions on both sides represent the same quantity under the stated assumptions.

Its job in the formula

The equals sign connects the complete expression on the left with the complete expression on the right. Both sides must have compatible units.

The passage around this formula

There is a structural reason this compounds rather than 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 clip. Whichever is chosen, information is discarded before a language model ever sees a token, and the TemporalBench failure…

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Learn the underlying idea

An equals sign says that the expression on its left and the expression on its right have the same value under the stated definitions and assumptions.

Open the illustrated equality: what the equals sign claims guide →

Sources cited in the article section

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.