Viewpoint: Optimizing for language compression led to current AI level

kuchaev · x · 2026-08-29

Christian Szegedy comments that optimizing for language compression is a profound and surprising result that led to the current level of AI. The cited content notes that Shannon estimated English is 75% redundant, with entropy of ≤1 bit per letter given long-range context. Modern LLMs compress English text to under 1 bit per character due to accurate prediction.

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