OpenAI's CLIP is the most important advancement in computer vision this year

This is in contrast to traditional computer vision models which disregard the context of their labels (in other words, a "normal" image classifier works just as well if your labels are "cat" and "dog" or "foo" and "bar"; behind the scenes it just converts them into a numeric identifier with no particular meaning).

In real world tasks, the "glyphs" are actually patterns of pixels (features) representing abstractions like colors, shapes, textures, and patterns (and even concepts like people and locations ).

One of the neatest aspects of CLIP is how versatile it is. When introduced by OpenAI they noted two use-cases: image classification and image generation . But in the 9 months since its release it has been used for a far wider variety of tasks.

OpenAI originally evaluated CLIP as a zero-shot image classifier. They compared it against traditional supervised machine learning models and it performed nearly on par with them without having to be trained on any specific dataset.

One challenge with traditional approaches to image classification is that you need lots of training examples that closely resemble the distribution of the images it will see in the wild. Because of this, CLIP does better on this task the less training data there is available.

DALL-E was developed by OpenAI in tandem with CLIP. It's a generative model that can produce images based on a textual description; CLIP was used to evaluate its efficacy.

The DALL-E model has still not been released publicly, but CLIP has been behind a burgeoning AI generated art scene. It is used to "steer" a GAN (generative adversarial network) towards a desired output. The most commonly used model is Taming Transformers' CLIP+VQGAN which we dove deep on here .

One extension of image classification is content moderation. If you ask it in the right way , CLIP can filter out graphic or NSFW images out of the box. We demonstrated content moderation with CLIP in a post here .

Because CLIP doesn't need to be trained on specific phrases, it's perfectly suited for searching large catalogs of images. It doesn't need images to be tagged and can do natural language search.

Yurij Mikhalevich has already created an AI-powered command image line search tool called rclip . It wouldn't surprise me if CLIP spawns a Google Image Search competitor in the near future.

Apple's Neuralhash semantic image similarity algorithm has been in the news a lot recently for how they're applying it to scanning user devices for CSAM. We showed how you can use CLIP to find similar images in the exact same way Apple's Neuralhash works.

The applications of being able to find similar images go far beyond scanning for illegal content, though. It could be used to search for copyright violations, create a clone of Tineye , or an advanced photo library de-duplicator.

It's not just factual representations that are encoded in CLIP's memory. It also knows about qualitative concepts as well (as we learned from the Unreal engine trick ).

We used this to create a CLIP judged Pictionary-style game , but you could also use it to create a camera app that "scores" users' photos by "searching" for phrases like "award winning photograph" or "professional selfie of a model" to help users decide which images to keep and which ones to trash, for example.

As an extension of image similarity, we've used CLIP to track objects across frames in a video . It uses an object detection model to find items of interest then crops the image and uses CLIP to determine if two detected objects are the same or difference instance of that object across different frames of a video.

Unfortunately, for many hyper-specific use-cases (eg examining the output of microchip lithography) or identifying things invented since CLIP was trained in 2020 (for example, the unique characteristics of CLIP+VQGAN creations), CLIP isn't capable of performing well out of the box for all problems. It should be possible to extend CLIP (essentially using it as a fantastic checkpoint for transfer learning) with additional data.

We've used CLIP along with GANs to convert text into images; there's no reason we can't go in the other direction and create rich captions for images with creative usage of CLIP (possibly along with a language model like GPT-3).

If you can classify images, it should be doable to classify frames of videos. In this way you could automatically split videos into scenes and create search indexes. Imagine searching YouTube for your company's logo and magically finding all of the places where someone happened to have used your product.