blip-caption VS MetaCLIP

I've been gleefully exploring the intersection of LLMs and CLI utilities for a few months now - they are such a great fit for each other! The unix philosophy of piping things together is a perfect fit for how LLMs work.

I've mostly been exploring this with my https://llm.datasette.io/ CLI tool, but I have a few other one-off tools as well: https://github.com/simonw/blip-caption and https://github.com/simonw/ospeak

I'm puzzled that more people aren't loudly exploring this space (LLM+CLI) - it's really fun.

I suggest trying BLIP for this. I've had really good results from that.

https://github.com/salesforce/BLIP

I built a tiny Python CLI wrapper for it to make it easier to try: https://github.com/simonw/blip-caption

(Github Repo | Most Popular Model | Paper)

Whenever I’m working on semantic search applications that connect images and text, I start with a family of models known as contrastive language image pre-training (CLIP). These models are trained on image-text pairs to generate similar vector representations or embeddings for images and their captions, and dissimilar vectors when images are paired with other text strings. There are multiple CLIP-style models, including OpenCLIP and MetaCLIP, but for simplicity we’ll focus on the original CLIP model from OpenAI. No model is perfect, and at a fundamental level there is no right way to compare images and text, but CLIP certainly provides a good starting point.