Vitalik Buterin, one of the founders of Ethereum, has expressed his support for the innovative Token for Image Tokenizer (TiTok) compression technique for its potential use on the blockchain.
TiTok, not to be confused with the popular social media platform TikTok, is a groundbreaking compression method that significantly decreases image size, making it more suitable for storage on the blockchain.
Buterin praised TiTok’s blockchain capabilities on the decentralized social media platform Farcaster, stating that “320 bits is basically a hash, small enough to be included on the chain for every user.”
This development could have a major impact on the storage of digital images, such as profile pictures (PFPs) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Developed by researchers from ByteDance and the Technical University Munich, TiTok allows images to be compressed into 32 small data pieces without compromising quality. Utilizing advanced artificial intelligence (AI) image compression, TiTok can compress a 256×256 pixel image into “32 discrete tokens.”
TiTok is a 1-dimensional (1D) image tokenization framework that overcomes the limitations of traditional 2D tokenization methods, resulting in more versatile and compact images.
By employing machine learning and advanced AI techniques, TiTok transforms images into tokenized representations using transformer-based models. The method identifies redundant information in different regions of the image to reduce the overall data size, resulting in a “compact latent representation” that is more efficient than conventional techniques.
Despite its resemblance in name, TikTok, the social media platform, did not receive Buterin’s endorsement. By highlighting TiTok’s potential for blockchain applications, Buterin has lent credibility to this new AI-driven image compression method, which aims to represent images with significantly fewer tokens than traditional 2D methods, offering a more efficient image representation.
In conclusion, the TiTok compression method has the potential to revolutionize image storage on the blockchain, offering a more efficient and effective way to represent images in a compact format.
Vitalik Buterin gives his approval for TikTok AI for storing images on the blockchain