The problem with "better intelligence" is that OpenAI is running out of human training data to pillage. Training AI on the output of AI smooths over the data distribution, so all the AIs wind up producing same-y output. So OpenAI stopped scraping text back in 2021 or so - because that's when the open web turned into an ocean of AI piss. I've heard rumors that they've started harvesting closed captions out of YouTube videos to try and make up the shortfall of data, but that seems like a way to stave off the inevitable[0].
Multimodal is another way to stave off the inevitable, because these AI companies already are training multiple models on different piles of information. If you have to train a text model and an image model, why split your training data in half when you could train a combined model on a combined dataset?
[0] For starters, most YouTube videos aren't manually captioned, so you're feeding GPT the output of Google's autocaptioning model, so it's going to start learning artifacts of what that model can't process.
