Encoder-Free Early Fusion

Multimodal design with minimal pre-processing instead of large standalone encoders: TML co-trains dMel audio + 40×40-patch hMLP + flow head in one transformer for 200ms latency; Gemma 4's 12B independently discards a 305M audio conformer for on-device memory; Inkling carries the design to 975B open-weight scale — but Kimi K3 keeps a 401M MoonViT-V2 encoder at 2.8T and tops the corpus on exactly the dense-text-in-image tasks where the encoder-free 12B regressed, so the verdict is now contested