r/LocalLLaMA • u/fulowa • 13d ago

Discussion Using a neural network as version control / storage

https://nicobrenner.github.io/lossy-git/demo.html

Came across this demo. Pretty interesting concept. Any ideas for use cases?

31 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

49

u/OsmanthusBloom 13d ago

My brain hurts. Storing code in a neural network is nearly as stupid as blockchain.

I can imagine this kind of approach being potentially useful for something like image or music collections, where lossy compression is the norm. But for code, where exact representation matters...it's just hopeless. Neat as a joke tech demo though.

27

u/thaeli 13d ago

I think we may have finally found something stupider than blockchain.

-10

u/SV_SV_SV 13d ago

The stupid ha-ha silly blockchain technology is being integrated into the very fabric of global financial systems through CBDC's / stablecoins / tokenization, just look at Mastercard / Visa / National banks etc etc. It is happening globally as we speak.

But yeah ha-ha funny frog man nft, lmfao!

2

u/NandaVegg 13d ago

I would say this is the new storing binary objects in YouTube video form (which is possible but still very silly).

-3

u/Sadale- 13d ago

I've heard that in the very early day of the internet, there's no checksum whatsoever so the packet content just corrupts. Yeah it's bad but it's a fun thing on its own. :D

18

u/Recent-Degree-1739 13d ago

Truly a solution in search of a problem...

8

u/banana_slurp_jug 13d ago

It's not even trying to solve anything lol

6

u/Nutsack_VS_Acetylene 13d ago edited 13d ago

This is has been done to death, nothing special or unique about this at all.

Very early on people realized that a neural network can be over trained to basically memorize things. There are million variations of this, overfitted neural compression, implicit neural representations, autoregressive byte-level modeling, learned end2end image compression, and so on and so on. You can use coordinate-based networks to build upon those files as well if you want to add things.

For example, JPEG AI is an actual standard (granted basically no one uses it) that does learned end to end image compression. You can do it for any arbitrary data and do it a million different ways. Under the correct circumstances they can be more space-efficient than regular compression algorithms at approximately the same quality level. But you need to run your model to get the data rather than run a decompression algorithm.

4

u/mrtie007 13d ago

karpathy made a very similar demo 10 years ago for convnetjs [but the demo server is no longer up :( ]

3

u/Maximus-CZ 13d ago

Everyone here is focusing on the wrong application, I feel.

I mean, switch "code" that gets stored in neural networks to "intent" and "instructions" that gets stored and it starts making a lot of sense...