Technology

37705 readers

116 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

AI language models can exceed PNG and FLAC in lossless compression, says study (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If someone wants to know what music I listen to... they could just ask. Or point a directional microphone at the window from a distance (technology that has existed for almost a century now, and modern systems can likely work from miles away).

Either would be a lot easier than exploiting a zero day side channel attack which would surely be detected and closed.

Also, it can take years for a music track to go from an idea in the artist's head to being available for download by a consumer. If it takes a week to compress the file... that's no biggie at all. Only the decompression side needs to be power efficient.