How do vision-language models (VLMs) work, and how does CLIP enable cross-modal understanding?

Multimodal is now table stakes, and this checks whether you understand how images and text reach a shared model. The signal is CLIP's contrastive alignment and how modern VLMs feed image features into an LLM's token space.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.