Yeah that's not lost on me. I'm just trying to put the accomplishment in context. To me, (misguided as I may be LOL), it means the state of the art for NN photo

Yeah that's not lost on me. I'm just trying to put the accomplishment in context. To me, (misguided as I may be LOL), it means the state of the art for NN photo compression is getting close to what we could do with wavelets in the late 90's. I don't mean to say that's bad; in fact I think that's pretty amazing. It's also good to maintain some perspective on what it's actually worth to do better than JPEG. We have had actual usable products better than JPEG for a long time (I mentioned J2K but there's been so many others like WebP and BPG etc), and no one cares. People use GIF as a short-form video format--that's how much no one cares about this stuff. So I think it's mostly worthwhile as research, to increase our ability with neural nets in general, rather than as an eventual product. But who knows?