CLIP is a gigantic leap forward, bringing many of the recent developments from the realm of natural language processing into the mainstream of computer vision: unsupervised learning, transformers, and multimodality to name a few. The burst of innovation it has inspired shows its versatility.

And this is likely just the beginning. There has been scuttlebutt recently about the coming age of "foundation models" in artificial intelligence that will underpin the state of the art across many different problems in AI; I think CLIP is going to turn out to be the bedrock model for computer vision.