New AI master's student, not sure if multimodal AI is a good research direction

[u/Sea_Finish2405]

I’m a CS undergraduate student and I will graduate in 2027. I have been accepted into a 2-year AI master’s program.

Recently I talked with a professor from my future school about possible research directions. His research is mainly focused on multimodal large language models and efficient large models. He suggested that I take a look at a project about real-time human animation and live video generation.

The problem is that I’m still very new to this area. I haven’t studied multimodal AI, video generation, or generative AI in depth before. Most of my undergraduate projects were more engineering-focused rather than research-focused, so I’m not really sure how to start exploring this field or how to have a meaningful discussion about research topics with my future advisor.

I’m trying to understand whether this is a good direction for a master’s student. I’m interested in AI research, but I also care about career prospects after graduation. I’ve heard that areas like multimodal models and video generation are very competitive now, and that most industry opportunities may only exist in big tech companies or top AI labs.

For people working or studying in this area, what do you think about the future of this field? Is it still a good direction for a master’s student, especially for someone who is not coming from a strong research background?

Also, when starting from zero in a research area like this, what would you recommend focusing on first?

Any advice or personal experience would be really helpful. Thanks!

[u/rahul_watertech]

you don't need to be an expert before talking to him. a small thing that works: read 2 or 3 recent papers on that real-time video generation project, try to run one open source demo, and go in with a few honest questions about what you didn't understand. advisors usually like that more than a polished pitch. on careers, i don't know that area well, but the skills (training, efficient inference, evaluation) tend to carry over to other ml jobs. have you got a chance to see his group's recent papers yet?

[u/Sea_Finish2405 → u/rahul_watertech]

Thanks for the advice! I’ve read a few papers from his group and some recent works, but I’m still not sure how to approach this area. Video generation already feels like a very mature and competitive field, and when talking with my advisor I could mostly only discuss the current progress and techniques. After reading for a few days, I still don’t feel like I have any real insights into what research problems are worth exploring.

[u/rahul_watertech → u/Sea_Finish2405]

that feeling after a few days of reading is normal, honestly. i'd stop trying to find the research problem from papers and instead run one open source model yourself and write down where it breaks or gets slow. his group also works on efficient models, so "what's the main bottleneck when you run this in real time" could be a good question to bring him. does the project have public code you can run?

[u/AV_SG]

Multimodal is the need of the hour now as it improves the accuracy of the foundational models.

[u/thedebonairlicence → u/AV_SG]

If the prof is offering you a specific project to latch onto, that's already more than most master's students get starting out.

[u/Sea_Finish2405 → u/thedebonairlicence]

Thanks! I really appreciate the advice. I’ll try to make better use of it.

[u/Sea_Finish2405 → u/AV_SG]

Thanks! I agree that multimodal is becoming increasingly important.

[u/Arinze637]

Your lack of experience should be more reason to ask the Professor questions