"yes" but that's a philosophical question. I think they're getting better at "early fusion" IE, training the model that "apple" and these visual tokens are the

"yes" but that's a philosophical question. I think they're getting better at "early fusion" IE, training the model that "apple" and these visual tokens are the the same concept, but LLMs are fundamentally a pattern matching machine so even with perfect fusion I personally wouldn't call it understanding.