AI with a $200 budget beats 8 years of manual work, boosting Zstd compression by 1-3%
Jsevillamol · x · 2026-09-27
- tmkadamcz reports that giving AI a $200 budget improved Zstd's compression ratio by 1-3% on standard benchmarks, without slowing compression or decompression.
- For context, manual improvements to Zstd's compression ratio totaled just 1.2% over the past 8 years. Given Zstd's ubiquity, small gains may be worth millions of dollars per year.
- The author reviewed the changes and found them legit (no architecture-specific hacks; gains transfer to held-out data), but is now paying a compression expert to verify the optimizations aren't flawed for non-obvious reasons.
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