New AI-based video compression techniques enable a 1000x reduction in data usage for approximately the same quality.
These new forms of compression are essentially Deep Faking Reality in real-time.
This can mean radical savings in terms of bandwidth and storage costs for media streaming services, as well as greatly lowered barriers to entry for competitors, or those who are forced to host their own content due to censorship.
YouTube wasn’t making profit for Google by 2015 due to enormous bandwidth costs, and it likely still isn’t. This new technology might lead to more economic empowerment for creators if YouTube stops abusing monetisation in asinine ways as a result.
The forced digital transition online in the past year has put our global networks under strain. Youtube and Netflix alone each account for 8.7% and 12.6% of global bandwidth usage respectively, and this can give us extra capacity and lowered latency, especially on expensive intercontinental backbones.
This radical new technique enables new markets for streaming in remote places and developing markets, for those on EDGE/3G, or expensive metered connections, including of course peer to peer Zooms and Skypes and such, as well as streaming gaming platforms such as Stadia, where the brains of your console lives somewhere in the cloud.
It also enables high fidelity remote experiences and avatar piloting even without stable 5G connections (chatting online is bad enough when it breaks, but losing connection whilst operating in a whole other environment could be catastrophic).
Similar techniques such as DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) are revolutionising gaming also, enabling one to run a game with lots of fancy graphical features, but at a tiny resolution (truly tiny – equivalent to a NES or C64), and using AI techniques to dynamically upscale to high definition. It's now computationally cheaper to do AI upscaling
than to run at the output resolution.
AI is not a cornucopia, but it's certainly a powerful force multiplier, one that is already enabling us to do a great deal more with fewer resources, at least in some respects.