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Is it reasonable to imagine a future where most devices come with a, say, 500MB file used for decompressing?

Imagine the potential bandwidth savings. I bet this has applications as a modern "Dial-up accelerator" for people with slow connections and fast hardware.

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It seems likely that to me we will eventually start using AI models for compression and decompression of text, images, 3d models, programs, video, and streaming. AI has the potential for much higher compression. It's actually quite feasible for most PCs and laptops to keep in memory multiple GBs models. And the typical PC game is dozens of GBs.

You run into a problem where the model needs to be exactly the same on both ends. If your model is a couple of MB then updating it on occasion is no problem, but if it's several GB then you DO have a problem.

Then if you want to decompress something that was archived 10 years ago you need to make sure you can find and install the old compression model.

And could you use that file to compress itself?

It's a bunch of weights, it's not really compressible. Obviously you can't decode the model without the model so it's useless as well.

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