This has been bothering me for a while. I feel like I have a decent conceptual grasp of what LLMs are doing with written text. But it seems like they also unlocked a bunch of progress in understanding and generating images, audio, and video. I can’t twist my brain into understanding the connection.

Is the boom in generated non-text content also built on LLMs, or is it just correlated with it because a bunch of excitement drove investment into the industry? I’m hoping for an ELI-non-ai-but-cs-major, this has been bothering me for a while.