ModernCS
Google Gemini

Generative AI · Taught with Google Gemini

Multimodal AI

Models that read documents, charts, screens and video. You build a real extraction pipeline, then learn the specific ways vision models invent table cells and miss small print.

Download the course plan
  • Advanced
  • 5 phases
  • 26 sessions
  • First session free

Syllabus

5 phases · 26 sessions · each phase ends in something you have built

1

Pixels Into Tokens

Know what an image actually costs and what the model sees after your file is resized.

$87

this phase

  1. 1.1

    What The Model Sees

    Free preview

    Vision encoder, MLP merger, and why a 4000px screenshot is downsampled before anything reads it.

    Open
  2. 1.2

    Counting Visual Tokens

    Gemini's 258 tokens per PDF page against Claude's 28x28 patch formula, priced over a thousand pages.

  3. 1.3

    Native Resolution & M-RoPE

    Dynamic resolution, NaFlex, and the 2x2 patch merge that turns a 224x224 image into 66 tokens.

  4. 1.4

    Current, Legacy, Retired

    Pixtral, Llama 3.2 Vision and Qwen2.5-VL are legacy, and video support rarely means a video file.

  5. 1.5

    Benchmarks After Saturation

    MMMU published its test answers in February 2026, DocVQA sits at ceiling, and what to read instead.

By the end of this phase:A token and cost model for your own images, PDFs and video, checked against three provider APIs.
2

Documents, Honestly

Pull structured data out of real PDFs and know exactly which fields are wrong.

$87

this phase

  1. 2.1

    The Eval Set First

    Fifty pages from your own corpus, labeled by hand, before you choose a single model.

  2. 2.2

    OCR Or Native VLM

    Chandra, olmOCR 2 and a 0.9B PaddleOCR-VL against Gemini 3.6 Flash on the same pages.

  3. 2.3

    Tables That Lie

    Merged cells, spanning headers, and the row a model invents because the pattern wanted one.

  4. 2.4

    Charts Without Numbers

    Reading values off an unlabeled axis, and the chart questions frontier models still get wrong.

  5. 2.5

    Schema-Constrained Extraction

    JSON schemas, per-field nulls, and making the model decline a field that is not on the page.

  6. 2.6

    Reading Order & Repetition

    Multi-column layout, footnotes, and the decode loop that repeats one paragraph until you stop it.

By the end of this phase:An extraction pipeline over 200 real pages with a per-field accuracy table and a cost per page.
3

Grounding & Retrieval

Make the model point at what it read, then find the right page out of ten thousand.

$87

this phase

  1. 3.1

    Boxes, Points, Masks

    Gemini returns ymin first, Qwen3-VL returns xmin first, and that swap ruins every overlay you draw.

  2. 3.2

    Cite The Pixels

    Every extracted field carries the box it came from, so a human can verify a page in seconds.

  3. 3.3

    Multimodal Embeddings

    SigLIP 2, Gemini Embedding 2 and voyage-multimodal-3.5, scored on your pages rather than on ViDoRe.

  4. 3.4

    Late Interaction, Costed

    ColPali-style retrieval wins recall and costs 100x to 1000x more vectors per page to store.

  5. 3.5

    Cross-Modal Search

    One index over pages, frames and transcripts, and the queries where plain keyword search still wins.

By the end of this phase:A visual search service returning the page, the box on it, and a measured recall@5.
4

Video That Fits

Answer questions about two hours of video without paying for two hours of frames.

$87

this phase

  1. 4.1

    Frames, FPS, Budget

    Gemini samples at 1 FPS for about 300 tokens a second, so a 1M context buys roughly one hour.

  2. 4.2

    Sampling That Keeps Evidence

    Uniform sampling against keyframe and query-guided selection, scored on the same question set.

  3. 4.3

    Audio Is Half The Answer

    Transcript alongside frames, and the lecture questions no amount of frame sampling will answer.

  4. 4.4

    Long Video Needs Retrieval

    Chunk into clips, retrieve, then answer, because LVBench tops out near 64 against 94 for humans.

  5. 4.5

    Temporal Failure Modes

    Event ordering, counting repeats, and needle-in-a-haystack search across two hours of footage.

By the end of this phase:A video QA tool over a two-hour recording that cites a timestamp for every answer.
5

Screens & Rails

Drive a real interface from screenshots, and stop a screenshot from driving you.

$87

this phase

  1. 5.1

    Screenshots As Input

    High-resolution displays, tiny targets, and why ScreenSpot-Pro still separates models that tie.

  2. 5.2

    Acting On A Screen

    Gemini 3.6 Flash built-in computer use against Anthropic's computer-use tool on ten identical tasks.

  3. 5.3

    OSWorld Is Not A Number

    85 percent, 83 percent, a 72.36 human baseline, and three harnesses that do not compare.

  4. 5.4

    Injection Through Pixels

    Typographic and steganographic instructions hidden in a screenshot, and defenses that partly hold.

  5. 5.5

    Approve Or Decline

    Human sign-off on irreversible actions, least privilege, and the automation you refuse to build.

By the end of this phase:A computer-use agent scored on a task set you wrote, plus an image-injection red-team report.

Tools you will use

  • Google Gemini 3.6 Flash
  • Claude Sonnet 5
  • Qwen3-VL 235B-A22B
  • olmOCR 2
  • PaddleOCR-VL
  • ColQwen2.5
  • Qdrant
  • SGLang
  • torchcodec
  • Holo3 35B-A3B

What you will build

  • The Page Ledger

    Two hundred real pages, per-field accuracy, cost per page

  • Find The Frame

    Ten thousand pages and two hours of video in one index

  • The Screen Agent

    Your own task set, a real score, an injection red team