AI experiments reportedly improve Zstd compression ratio by 1–3% on a $200 budget

An experimenter reports that AI with a $200 budget improved Zstd's compression ratio by 1–3% on standard benchmarks without slowing compression or decompression. They say the changes transfer to held-out data and appear not to be architecture-specific hacks. But they acknowledge limited compression expertise and caution that there could be good reasons Zstd hasn't made these apparent optimizations. They're seeking input from a compression expert—ideally a Zstd maintainer—and say Epoch AI can pay for that time.