alt Hacker News>Mixing this can let you believe that you can use a compressor to do the same thing as LLMs, which you cannot.
You can, actually! Any compressor can be losslessly converted into a generator, and vice versa.
Traditional compressors like gzip are of course very simple and can only replicate rough patterns from the input. But they are technically doing the same thing.
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pjankiewicz • yesterday at 8:39 PM
I agree that technically they are doing the same thing but in practice LLMs are better compressors than PNGs (learned this while I was researching this topic). That was quite surprising to me.
Actually, it's trivial. I did it for fun once when I was learning about the PPM algorithm. It took about 15 minutes to reverse the whole thing.