While LLMs have been used for… a lot, it seems like this use might be one where it’s not only reliable but it appears to outperform existing methods of image compression. Being able to cram more data into less space tends to lead to interesting developments, so I will be keeping my eye on this.
What do you guys think? Seem like it’s deserving of less hype than I’m giving it? What kind of security holes do you think this could open?
With a neural network, you wouldn’t be able to mathematically prove that the signal is perfectly recovered 100% of the time for all possible inputs. That is the case with PNG and FLAC. If you’re just listening to music and need a good compression ratio, then sure, it won’t be a big deal if a couple of bits are wrong. But that’s also why we have lossy compression. If the goal is to make signal degradation imperceptible to a human, then you could get a much better compression ratio using neural networks. If it’s truly critical that the signal isn’t corrupted, it would probably be better to just use the original method.
That isn’t really the case; while many neural network implementations make nondeterministic optimizations, floating point arithmetic is in principle entirely deterministic, and it isn’t too hard to get a neural network to run deterministically if needed. They are perfectly applicable for lossless compression, which is what is done in this article.
Once we figure out how to get data out consistently 1:1 without hallucinations, the floodgates will open IMO.
And i’ll be all over it personally, especially with FLAC files that range anywhere from 20MB to 70MB, any savings to rein these in closer to a typical MP3 will be much appreciated by myself. I don’t mind long compression times, as 7zip and the other formats give us long waiting times already.
If AI accelerator hardware is able to speed up the data compression process, this is where I’d maybe start to get a bit suspicious, as these accelerators at the moment are included in various in IoT and camera SoCs. A single exploit is all that would be needed to theoretically allow the user’s personal data to be siphoned off quickly, without noticing a change in the volume of network traffic, or negative impact to the performance of the IoT device
I never really had issues with flac in the last years, since 128+ gb micro sd cards got dirt cheap. But maybe my music taste isn’t general/wide enough to fill up such a card fast.