The benefits are similar to when you consolidate tasks with a lot of similarities. Advancements in one area can be immediately applied to another area. You can

The benefits are similar to when you consolidate tasks with a lot of similarities. Advancements in one area can be immediately applied to another area. You can consolidate your effort into a single point. Training a network is increasingly cost prohibitive, into the millions of dollars, and this would allow you to consolidate these expenses. EDIT: Looks like they still need to train for each modality so no benefit from that here. I'd imagine on the flip side the potential problems would be when gains in one modality are offset by a decrease in performance in another or you are prevented from trying new things because of the choices made to support a unified architecture.