Vision language models (VLMs) are a type of artificial intelligence that combines natural language processing and computer vision to understand and generate text based on visual inputs. They can be trained on large datasets of images and corresponding text descriptions, allowing them to learn complex relationships between visual and linguistic features. VLMs have applications in areas such as image captioning, visual question answering, and multimodal generation. --- Why it matters: VLMs matter because they enable the development of more sophisticated AI systems that can interact with humans through both text and images, which is crucial for applications like robotics, virtual assistants, and multimedia content creation. Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/vlms