Skip to main content

AI could help turbocharge your SSD’s effective storage by compressing data even further — but just don’t delete 7zip just yet

DeepMind scientists have treated compression technology to a major upgrade thanks to a large language model (LLM) that has achieved astonishing lossless compression rates with image and audio data.

Thanks to the company’s Chinchilla 70B LLM, the researchers used a special compression algorithm to reduce images to 43.4% and audio files to 16.4% of their original sizes, as detailed in their paper - making it better than some of the best compression software out there.

By contrast, standard image compression algorithm PNG reduces images to 58.5% and FLAC compressors shrink audio to 30.3% of their original file sizes. It means storing so much more on any one of the best SSDs.

Although Chinchilla 70B is trained mainly on text, they achieved these results by leaning on the predictive capabilities of the model, and framed the “prediction problem” through the lens of file compression. In other words, they retooled the best qualities of an LLM and found these traits also serve to compress large files.

AI is great at compression – up to a point

The DeepMind researchers showed that due to this equivalence between prediction and compression, any compressor can be used as a conditional generative model – and even the other way around. 

But, they added, they can only achieve such compression results up to a certain file size, meaning using generative AI as a compression solution may not be practical for everyone.

“We evaluated large pretrained models used as compressors against various standard compressors, and showed they are competitive not only on text but also on modalities they have never been trained on,” the researchers noted.

“We showed that the compression viewpoint provides novel insights on scaling laws since it takes the model size into account, unlike the log-loss objective, which is standard in current language modeling research.”

Due to this scaling limitation, the models used in this research aren’t better than, say, the likes of 7zip when you’re looking at files above a certain threshold. They may not compress as impressively as the results show, and they may also not be as fast as conventional compression algorithms.     

More from TechRadar Pro



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TechRadar's Year in Review: AI revolution, smartphone evolution, and visions of the future

If I had to sum up 2023 in one word it would be AI. Okay, technically that’s two initials, but let’s not quibble – because there’s no doubt that it provided the year in tech with its main story arc. Artificial intelligence was everywhere this year, as every company in the world gawped at the massive impact of ChatGPT, and decided they wanted to jump aboard that bandwagon. You could barely move for new chatbots, new image generators, and new AI-enhanced features in every device released in 2023. And there’s no sign of that changing in 2024; in fact, we expect it to be an even bigger deal. Elsewhere, phones and laptops did much the same as they had the previous year – well, except where they had new AI-enhanced features – so it was in the virtual reality space where bigger changes were afoot. If the Meta Quest 3 was impressive then the Apple Vision Pro looks to be genuinely game-changing, and we can’t wait to see what impact it has in the next 12 months. Of course we also saw plenty ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Microsoft and Sony enter "binding agreement" to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation

Microsoft has announced that it has reached a "binding agreement" with Sony, pledging to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.  With Microsoft having won its anti-trust case with the US Federal Trade Commission , its planned acquisition of Call of Duty developers Activision Blizzard has taken a big step closer to becoming a reality. In order to alleviate the concerns of monopoly-building that got Microsoft in legal hot water to begin with, the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, announced yesterday via Tweet that it has entered into an "agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation."  This agreement will no doubt come as a relief to fans concerned that Microsoft's acquisition plans might result in Call of Duty becoming an Xbox exclusive, following in the footsteps of future Bethesda releases. Since Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda caused the studio to break its tradition of offering titles cross-platform for upcomi...
Post a Comment
Read more

This Stardew Valley-like farming sim plays at the bottom of your screen so you work and play at the same time

Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing are among some of the best choices out there if you're looking for a game to get swept up in for hours at a time. But, if you're a fan of management sims and a multitasker as well, this upcoming farming sim will likely pique your interest.  Developed by Mister Morris Games, Rusty's Retirement is an idle-farming simulation game that runs at the bottom of your gaming monitor, allowing you to focus on other tasks like working while you tend to your crops. Set to release in Q1 2024 on Steam , the idle sim puts you in the shoes of a wholesome robot as you grow crops and use them to produce clean and energy-efficient biofuel. Having gathered this "vital robot power source," you'll then need to sell your harvest to the other machine inhabitants of your settlement. This, in turn, will let you reinvest the money into expanding your farm. If you're a terrible procrastinator (like me) this might not sound like your cup of tea...
Post a Comment
Read more