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Equation 4 · Part 7 · The Hardest Unsolved Problems in Multimodal AI

multiplication

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

What this part means

Multiply the quantities on either side.

Its job in the formula

Multiply the quantities on either side.

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

Multiplication scales one quantity by another. A dot, a cross, or adjacent symbols can indicate a product.

Open the illustrated multiplication: combining factors guide →

Sources cited in the article section

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