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Build Your Own Vision Model

AI can read text. But the world is visual.

In 30 minutes you'll teach a model to see — and understand how every AI vision system works.

For absolute beginners. No assumed knowledge.

Chapter 1: The Blind Bot

Your AI agent can write poetry, solve equations, and debate philosophy. But show it a picture of your cat, and it sees... nothing.

The Blind Test

📸 Click to upload an image

Show your AI what it can't see

The fundamental problem: AI models are text processors. They take words in, output words out. Images are pixels, not words.

So how do you feed a picture into something that only understands words? You make the picture look like words.

📚 Go Deeper

CLIP: Connecting Text and Images — OpenAI's breakthrough paper

Chapter 2: Patches to Tokens

Vision Transformers literally treat image patches as words. Slice an image into 16×16 patches. Each patch becomes a token.

The Patch Grid

📸 Upload an image to see it get "tokenized"

Text vs. Image Tokens

Text Tokenization

Input: "A red cat sits on a mat"

A red cat sits on a mat
7 tokens → Transformer

Image Tokenization

Input: 224×224 image of a cat

P1 P2 P3 ... P64
64 patches → Same Transformer!

The breakthrough insight: Both text and images are just sequences of tokens to a Transformer. The architecture doesn't care if token #1 is the word "cat" or a 16×16 patch of pixels.

🔗 Connection: Remember tokenization from Build Your Own LLM? Same idea, different input. Text gets split into subwords. Images get split into patches. Both become vectors that the transformer processes identically. This is why the same architecture works for text AND images.

📚 Go Deeper

ViT Paper: "An Image is Worth 16×16 Words" — The original Vision Transformer

Yannic Kilcher's ViT Explanation — Great visual walkthrough

Chapter 3: CLIP — Connecting Words and Pictures

CLIP trained on 400 million image-text pairs. Images and text end up in the same vector space. "King - man + woman = queen" but for images.

🔗 Connection: Remember embeddings from Build Your Own RAG? CLIP does the same thing — but maps images AND text into the same vector space. If you skipped RAG, the key idea: similar meanings land near each other as numbers. → Build Your Own RAG
🔄 Spaced Repetition: Back in Build Your Own LLM, you saw how text becomes tokens. Vision models do the same trick: chop an image into 16×16 patches, and each patch becomes a token. → Build Your Own LLM

The CLIP Embedding Space

Magic happens here: Images and their descriptions get mapped to nearby points in a high-dimensional space.

Image: "A cat"
Text: "A cat"
↓ Encode separately
[0.2, -0.5, 0.8, ...]
[0.1, -0.4, 0.9, ...]
↓ Train to be close
Same point in space!

Search Images with Text

This is how every AI image search works. Google Photos, Pinterest, Midjourney — they're all measuring distances in CLIP space.

Build Your Own CLIP

// Simplified CLIP implementation in JavaScript
class SimpleCLIP {
  constructor() {
    this.textEmbeddings = new Map();
    this.imageEmbeddings = new Map();
    
    // Pre-computed embeddings (in real CLIP, these come from neural networks)
    this.textEmbeddings.set('cat', [0.8, -0.2, 0.5, 0.1]);
    this.textEmbeddings.set('dog', [0.7, -0.1, 0.4, 0.2]);
    this.textEmbeddings.set('car', [-0.3, 0.9, -0.2, 0.6]);
    this.textEmbeddings.set('sunset', [0.1, 0.3, 0.8, -0.4]);
  }
  
  // Calculate cosine similarity between two vectors
  similarity(vec1, vec2) {
    const dot = vec1.reduce((sum, a, i) => sum + a * vec2[i], 0);
    const mag1 = Math.sqrt(vec1.reduce((sum, a) => sum + a * a, 0));
    const mag2 = Math.sqrt(vec2.reduce((sum, a) => sum + a * a, 0));
    return dot / (mag1 * mag2);
  }
  
  // Search images by text
  searchImages(textQuery) {
    const queryEmbedding = this.textEmbeddings.get(textQuery.toLowerCase());
    if (!queryEmbedding) return [];
    
    const results = [];
    for (const [image, embedding] of this.imageEmbeddings) {
      const score = this.similarity(queryEmbedding, embedding);
      results.push({ image, score });
    }
    
    return results.sort((a, b) => b.score - a.score);
  }
}

📚 Go Deeper

CLIP Paper — "Learning Transferable Visual Representations from Natural Language Supervision"

Welch Labs: CLIP Explained — Excellent visual explanation

Chapter 4: Vision-Language Models

Take a vision encoder (ViT) + a language model (GPT). Connect them with a projection layer. Every multimodal AI is just a vision encoder plugged into an LLM.

Drag & Drop Architecture

Build your own vision-language model by connecting the pieces:

👁️
Vision
Encoder
🔄
Projection
Layer
🧠
Language
Model
Drop components here to build your model

The Models You Know

GPT-4V
ViT + GPT-4
LLaVA
CLIP + LLaMA
Claude 3
ViT + Claude
Gemini Pro Vision
ViT + Gemini

Different vision encoders, different LLMs, same architecture.

The Code

// Simplified vision-language model
class VisionLanguageModel {
  constructor() {
    this.visionEncoder = new VisionTransformer();
    this.projectionLayer = new LinearProjection(768, 4096); // Vision → Text dims
    this.languageModel = new GPT();
  }
  
  async generate(image, textPrompt) {
    // 1. Encode the image
    const imagePatches = this.preprocessImage(image); // 224x224 → 8x8 patches
    const imageEmbeddings = this.visionEncoder.encode(imagePatches); // [64, 768]
    
    // 2. Project to language model dimensions
    const projectedEmbeddings = this.projectionLayer.forward(imageEmbeddings); // [64, 4096]
    
    // 3. Tokenize text prompt
    const textTokens = this.tokenize(textPrompt); // "What do you see?" → [1234, 567, 890]
    const textEmbeddings = this.languageModel.embed(textTokens); // [3, 4096]
    
    // 4. Concatenate image + text embeddings
    const combinedInput = [...projectedEmbeddings, ...textEmbeddings]; // [67, 4096]
    
    // 5. Generate response
    const response = this.languageModel.generate(combinedInput);
    return this.decode(response);
  }
}

// Usage
const model = new VisionLanguageModel();
const response = await model.generate(catImage, "What do you see?");
console.log(response); // "I see a orange cat sitting on a blue mat..."

📚 Go Deeper

LLaVA Paper — Large Language and Vision Assistant

GPT-4V System Card — How OpenAI built multimodal GPT-4

Chapter 5: See For Yourself

Let's wire up a real vision model. Upload a photo, get a description, ask questions about it. Your agent can now see.

Vision API Integration

📸 Upload an image for AI to analyze

Your agent will describe what it sees

The Complete Pipeline

// Complete vision pipeline
async function analyzeImage(imageFile, question = "What do you see?") {
  // 1. Convert image to base64
  const base64Image = await fileToBase64(imageFile);
  
  // 2. Call vision API (OpenAI GPT-4V example)
  const response = await fetch('https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      'Authorization': `Bearer ${API_KEY}`
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      model: 'gpt-4-vision-preview',
      messages: [{
        role: 'user',
        content: [
          { type: 'text', text: question },
          { 
            type: 'image_url', 
            image_url: { url: `data:image/jpeg;base64,${base64Image}` }
          }
        ]
      }],
      max_tokens: 500
    })
  });
  
  const data = await response.json();
  return data.choices[0].message.content;
}

// Helper function
function fileToBase64(file) {
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    const reader = new FileReader();
    reader.readAsDataURL(file);
    reader.onload = () => {
      const base64 = reader.result.split(',')[1];
      resolve(base64);
    };
    reader.onerror = error => reject(error);
  });
}

// Usage
const imageFile = document.getElementById('image-input').files[0];
const description = await analyzeImage(imageFile, "Describe this image in detail");
console.log(description);

📚 Go Deeper

OpenAI Vision Guide — How to use GPT-4 with images

HuggingFace Vision Models — Free alternatives to try

Your Agent Can See

You just built the visual intelligence behind every modern AI system:

  • Image tokenization — How to feed pixels to transformers
  • CLIP embeddings — How to search images with text
  • Vision-language models — How to make AI see and talk
  • Real vision API — How to integrate with your agent

This isn't theory. This is how GPT-4V sees your photos. How Claude analyzes your screenshots. How every "multimodal AI" actually works under the hood.

The magic isn't the model. It's the tokenization. Turn anything into tokens, and transformers can process it.

What You Can Build Now

With vision, your AI can understand any visual input.

📸 Photo Organizer
Sort and tag thousands of images automatically
🎨 Design Assistant
Analyze UI mockups and generate code
📊 Chart Reader
Extract data from graphs and infographics
🔍 Visual Search
Find similar images in massive databases

Vision + Language = Limitless Possibilities

What will you teach your agent to see?

🧠 Final Recall

Test yourself. No peeking. These questions cover everything you just learned.

1. Why can't AI models see images by default?





2. How do Vision Transformers (ViT) process images?





3. What makes CLIP's approach to vision-language learning special?





4. What are the core components of a vision-language model?





5. How do you send both an image and text to a multimodal API?





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