DeepMind’s Chinchilla AI toasts FLAC and PNG at lossless data compression despite essentially being just a large language model

If you think FLAC is the audiophile’s friend when it comes to lossless music files, a large language model (LLM) has news for you, as it’s now laying claim to compression as part of AI’s growing realm of influence, too.

A study titled “Language Modeling Is Compression” (via ArsTechnica) discusses a finding about an LLM by DeepMind called Chinchilla 70B and its ability to perform lossless data compression better than FLAC for audio and PNG for pictures.

Chinchilla 70B could significantly shrink the size of image patches from the ImageNet database, reducing them to only 43.4% of their original size without losing any detail. This performance is better than the PNG algorithm, which could only reduce the image sizes to 58.5%.

Additionally, Chinchilla compresses audio data from the LibriSpeech to just 16.4% of their actual size for sound files. This is impressive, especially compared to the FLAC compression, which could only reduce the audio sizes to 30.3%.