Vitalik Buterin supports TiTok AI for storing images on the blockchain

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has given his approval to the innovative Token for Image Tokenizer (TiTok) compression method for its potential use on the blockchain.
TiTok, not to be confused with the popular social media platform TikTok, offers a significant reduction in image size, making it more suitable for storage on the blockchain.
Buterin praised TiTok’s potential for blockchain applications on the decentralized social media platform Farcaster, noting that “320 bits is basically a hash. Small enough to go on chain for every user.”
This development could have important implications for storing digital images such as profile pictures (PFPs) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Developed by ByteDance and researchers from the Technical University Munich, TiTok allows images to be compressed into 32 small data pieces without compromising quality.
Using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) image compression technology, TiTok can compress a 256×256 pixel image into “32 discrete tokens,” as outlined in the research paper.
TiTok breaks free from the grid constraints of traditional 2D tokenization methods, resulting in more flexible and compact images.
By harnessing machine learning and advanced AI with transformer-based models, TiTok converts images into tokenized representations, identifying and utilizing redundant information in different regions of the image to reduce data size.
The compact latent representation of TiTok offers more efficient and effective image representations compared to conventional techniques, as highlighted in the research paper.
Despite the similarity in name, the social media platform TikTok did not receive the same endorsement from Buterin, who emphasized TiTok’s potential for blockchain use, bringing credibility to this new AI-driven image compression method.
The proposed method aims to represent images with significantly fewer tokens than traditional 2D tokenizers, shedding light on more efficient image representation methods.
In other news, a $1M bet on ChatGPT’s ability to lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI), Apple’s intelligent AI usage, and the rise of AI millionaires are featured in the AI Eye magazine.