Compressed filesystems à la language models | Hacker News Reader

Compressed filesystems à la language models

grohan.co

67 pointsgrohan14 comments

> Presciently, Hutter appears to be absolutely right. His enwik8 and enwik9’s benchmark datasets are, today, best compressed by a 169M parameter LLM

Okay, that's not fair. There's a big advantage to having an external compressor and reference file whose bytes aren't counted, whether or not your compressor models knowledge.

More importantly, even with that advantage it only wins on the much smaller enwiki8. It loses pretty badly on enwiki9.

Bellard has trained various models, so it may not be the specific 169M parameter LLM, but his Transformer-based `nncp` is indeed #1 on the "Large Text Compression Benchmark" [1], which correctly accounts for both the total size of compressed enwik9 + decompresser size (zipped).

There is no unfair advantage here. This was also achieved in the 2019-2021 period; it feels safe to say that Bellard could have likely pushed the frontier far further with modern compute/techniques.

[1] https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

Okay, that's a much better claim. nncp has sizes of 15.5MB and 107MB including the decompressor. The one that's linked, ts_zip, has sizes of 13.8MB and 135MB excluding the decompressor. And it's from 2023-2024.

Yep, this is like taking a file, saving a different empty file named as base-64 encoded contents of the first and claim you compressed it down by 100%.

> Okay, that's not fair. There's a big advantage to having an external compressor and reference file whose bytes aren't counted, whether or not your compressor models knowledge.

The benchmark in question (Hutter prize) does count the size of the decompressor/reference file (as per the rules, the compressor is supposed to produce a self-decompressing file).

The article mentions Bellard's work but I don't see his name in the top contenders of the prize, so I'm guessing his attempt was not competitive enough if you take into account the LLM size, as per the rules.

The benchmark counts it but the LLM compressor that was linked in that sentence clearly doesn't count the size.

It is also wrong because the current state of the art algorithm for the Hutter prize is 110 Mb large on enwiki9 and also includes the actual compression and decompression logic.

Any manually designed algorithm is external to the compressed data, while also being a model for it. It's just designed manually vs the automatic optimization. I'd say the line is pretty blurred here.

Love the quote:

  Every systems engineer at some point in their journey yearns to write a filesystem

It reminds me of a friend who had a TRS-80 color computer (like me) in the 1980s who was a self-taught BASIC programmer who developed a very complex BBS system and was frustrated that the cluster size for the RS-DOS file system was half a track so there was a lot of space wasted when you stored small files. He called me up one day and told me he'd managed to store 180k of files on a 157k disc and I had to break it to him that he was storing 150k (minus metadata) files on a 157k disk as opposed to the 125k or so he was getting before... With BASIC!

Sort of similar vibes as "The children yearn for the mines"

Reminds me of ts_zip by Fabrice Bellard: https://bellard.org/ts_zip/

Interesting experiment but the author lists some caveats (Not exhaustive by any means):

"Of course, in the short term, there’s a whole host of caveats: you need an LLM, likely a GPU, all your data is in the context window (which we know scales poorly), and this only works on text data."

Interesting. I had an idea cooking some days ago. And implementing exactly this was the first step that i was gonna work on this weekend. Funny how often this happens here on HN. Thank you for this inspiration & motivation. And: It was a joy to read.

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