I remember reading an article on here by one of the founders of MPEG about why he was leaving MPEG after several decades, and part of it was that modern AI is indistinguishable from compression and he wanted to explore new compression algorithms using the recent explosion of knowledge

The newest submissions to Hutter Prize made crazy jumps by just replacing the LSTM with a transformer and training it.

35'000$ for a prompt and some training is a nice chunk of cash.

Next steps are replacing the encoders and all the other human-biased compression parts by just raw data and training, probably another 20-30% is up for grabs.