this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

So like, mp3, gzip and zstd? Why would you use a LLM for compression??

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The research specifically looked at lossless algorithms, so gzip

"For example, the 70-billion parameter Chinchilla model impressively compressed data to 8.3% of its original size, significantly outperforming gzip and LZMA2, which managed 32.3% and 23% respectively."

However they do say that it's not especially practical at the moment, given that gzip is a tiny executable compared to the many gigabytes of the LLM's dataset.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you need the dataset to do the compression? Is the trained model not effective on its own?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well from the article a dataset is required, but not always the heavier one.

Tho it doesn't solve the speed issue, where the llm will take a lot more time to do the compression.

gzip can compress 1GB of text in less than a minute on a CPU, an LLM with 3.2 million parameters requires an hour to compress

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