Google is using AI to compress photos, just like on HBO's Silicon Valley

Researchers at Google are working on a way to use neural networks, the building blocks of modern artificial intelligence, to make our picture files smaller without sacrificing quality. To consumers, smaller files means more available space on phones, tablets, and computers, but for tech companies like Google that offer unlimited photo storage, smaller photos could reduce server load, power consumption, and improve transfer speeds. This sort of idea has made its way into pop culture thanks to HBO's Silicon Valley, where the fictional compression startup Pied Piper uses neural networks to optimize how they shrink files. Google's work teaches neural networks how to scrimp and save data by looking at examples of how standard compression works in random images from the internet, according to a technical paper published on ArXiv. The paper shows that neural networks can beat standard JPEG compression on standard tests, according to the Google team.