I would not use the word "just" in describing this, but there absolutely is a connection between compression and what neural networks do. See, for example: htt

I would not use the word "just" in describing this, but there absolutely is a connection between compression and what neural networks do. See, for example: https://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~dsculley/papers/compressionAndVectors.pdf https://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~dsculley/papers/compressionAndVe... https://www.academia.edu/6214482/The_Relationship_of_Machine_Learning_and_Data_Compression_to_Natural_Language_Processing_A_Review https://www.academia.edu/6214482/The_Relationship_of_Machine... And, ... well, Google around, you'll find stuff. Unfortunately it can be hard to separate out the stuff that just talks about the connections between compression and ML in the abstract sense, from papers talking about specific applications of ML/DL for various aspects of compression. Not that the latter aren't also interesting, of course.