That is to say, specifically, that it is not possible, by any means, to take any block of text and reduce it to a smaller block of text without losing some information.
That is infinite compression; if you could do this, you could reduce any dataset to 1 bit and recover the data seamlessly.
You can’t.
What that means is that this approach is fundamentally just improving performance, it’s not solving the problem.
When you compress a conversation into a summary, some information will be lost. You can tweak and fold and do whatever clever things you want, but fundamentally you are losing information.
…and the process is recursive. So at some point you will be summarising a set of summaries… and you will lose some information you’ve summarised, to some extent.
You can’t not lose information with this process.
So… while, it probably helps in trivial cases, putting recursive summaries into your prompt is kind of daft, and almost certainly doesn’t actually work when you try use it to do useful things.
It probably looks like it’s working when you don’t use the recursive summaries heavily, because at that point you’re not losing much information.
…but, I’m going to bet that it doesn’t scale, and people using it will find that out pretty quickly as they use it.