Is a photo only 42 bits of information? Ord and Greenblatt debate compression of reality
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-09-07
Responding to Toby Ord's claim that a photograph carries only 42 bytes of information, Ryan Greenblatt argues that 'pointing into our universe' via time and space is cheating: allow the same for text and you can represent extremely long environment-generated sequences with very few bytes.
Ord concedes that under such a scheme only a tiny fraction of gibberish long sequences truly carry small information. A high-quality debate on information theory and the compressibility of the real world.
More from Research
- New tendon-based robotic hand designs trained with PPO to learn one-armed catch — _krishna_murthy · 2026-10-23
- Google QuantumAI and Kaggle launch $150K verifiable quantum circuit compilation competition — JFPuget · 2026-10-23
- Diffusion LLM bias rankings shift with sampling configs, persist after debiasing — Bollegala · 2026-10-23
- Aggregating lab tokenizers reveals ~994 tokens stable across Google, DeepSeek, Meta, Anthropic — kalomaze · 2026-10-23
- Researcher uses Grok to hunt LLM-driven UAE bot network on X with self-written prompts — FlorianGallwitz · 2026-10-23
- Dev converts Qwen3-0.6B into a MoE model: quality drops and no speed gain at this scale — Bayliner1980 · 2026-10-23