1. Ignore the benchmarks. I've been A/Bing 11B today with Molmo 72B [1], which itself has an ELO neck-and-neck with GPT4o, and it's even. Because everyone in open source tends to train on validation benchmarks, you really can not trust them.
2. The method of tokenization/adapter is novel and uses many fewer tokens than all comparable CLIP/SigLIP-adapter models, making it _much_ faster. Attention is O(n^2) on memory/compute per sequence length.
[1] https://molmo.allenai.org/blog