Transform and Conquer: How Google Compresses LLMs 6x by Changing Coordinates
Multiplication is hard. Addition is easy. Any elementary school kid knows this. What they don’t know is that logarithms exist precisely to exploit this asymmetry: you convert multiplication into addition, operate in the simple world, then undo the transformation. The result is correct. The effort, a fraction. This pattern — transform the problem to a space where solving it is trivial, solve it, then transform back — is one of the most powerful in all of engineering. FFT does this with signals. Logarithms do it with products. And now Google just published a paper that does it with language model compression. ...