On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 3:59 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]>
wrote:

>
> The reason that we can use text compression to test language models but we
> can't use video compression to test vision models is signal to noise ratio.
>

We can't really use compression to test language models—not because of the
noise floor, but because of political economy and industrial path
dependency (ala The Hardware Lottery).  It's absurd that neither the Hutter
Prize nor your LTCB is funded by the insurance industry with billions of
dollars in underwriting in order to discount the risk that capital
investments in current algorithms and hardware will need to be written
off.  That's all political economy nonsense arising from taxing activity
rather than the liquidation value of net assets at something like the
30-year Treasury rate.  And, yeah, that's _my_ theory of macrosocial
dynamics showing from my experience getting the government to stop
protecting public and private monopoly power with the resources of
entrepreneurs like Musk.  And that's why I started looking for ways of
reforming the social pseudosciences because no one would believe me until
now it's almost too late.

Given what is at stake in macrosocial dynamical theory, the juice is worth
the squeeze whereas it may not be in video compression, nor in many other
areas where less is at stake and therefore there is less of a conflict of
interest bedeviling the science.

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