Modern LLMs Compress English Text to Under 1 Bit Per Character

docmilanfar · x · 2026-08-27

Reflecting on Shannon's estimate 75 years ago that English is 75% redundant, the entropy is no more than 1 bit per letter when considering long-range context. Only recently have text encoders achieved this rate. In fact, modern LLMs predict the next character so accurately that they routinely compress English text to under 1 bit per character.

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