Comment by keeda

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Comment by keeda

No, you can't say that about JPEG compression. I know how the output of a JPEG compression is structured so it is not incomprehensible to me. (I have worked with A/V transcoding and written custom media compression schemes, but anybody can look up how JPEG works.) JPEG performs relatively straightforward, deterministic mathematical transforms that are actually reversible if you do not discard details (but discarding details is what makes it compress better.) JPEG does not extract patterns from a billion images of, say, cats and encode that into weights that represent the concept of a "cat". Or dogs, or cars, or faces.

LLMs do, and they encode so many concepts and the relationships between them into so many weights that it is a literally incomprehensible blob of floats. They are not just a storage format, and there is no way to recover the original content verbatim from these weights, except for a very small handful of extremely popular works like Harry Potter.

As another example, JPEG will discard details from the original image, and when decoded, will display missing details as blocks. But it will never hallucinate output that never existed in the input data. Like, a JPEG of a cat can never randomly be decoded into an image of a dog.

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