Comment by amelius

6 days ago

Perhaps a better question is if LLMs are used as compressors, how well is that expected to work.

> if LLMs are used as compressors, how well is that expected to work

Quite well. This project[1], by Fabrice Bellard of ffmpeg fame, is quite old in AI years and uses an ancient LLM, but still beats xz by a solid margin.

[1]: https://bellard.org/ts_zip/

  • Makes me wonder if compression ratio can be used as a measure for intelligence. Any benchmarks using it?

    • > Any benchmarks using it?

      A challenge as I understand it is reproducibility.

      Normal LLM runtimes aren't typically fully reproducible even with same random seeds for distribution sampling, due to floating-point numbers, batching and such.

      Though averaging over many runs could alleviate that I suppose.

      While it would measure some aspects of intelligence, I'd argue it fails to capture other, more creative aspects.