What Nobody Tells You About Multimodal Data Pipelines for AI Training (opens in new tab)

Most discussions about AI model training focus on architecture choices, compute budgets, and evaluation benchmarks. The data pipeline that feeds those models? It gets a paragraph, maybe two. Maybe a diagram with an arrow labeled "data ingestion." That gap is a real problem. In practice, data engineering is where most AI projects quietly fall apart. Not at the model level. Not at inference. At the pipeline.