I don't think that's as surprising/chilling as people make it out to be. Let's say I run a compression algorithm (e.g., Huffman coding) on a billion strings, an

I don't think that's as surprising/chilling as people make it out to be. Let's say I run a compression algorithm (e.g., Huffman coding) on a billion strings, and a very common substring is "hello, world". I wouldn't be surprised if the compression algorithm "learned" to compress "hello, world" to a single bit 0. There are a few big jumps to get to cat faces (e.g., the representation has to be approximate), but I don't see why the idea is fundamentally different.