Google engineers have developed a method to compress artificial intelligence (AI) data so that it requires up to six times less working memory to function. With the new system, called TurboQuant, AI algorithms could retain the same amount of information and perform equally powerful computations, but with significantly less memory hardware, the company says. For example, if you ask ChatGPT what the weather will be like tomorrow in your area, it may store words like "weather" and "tomorrow," along with your location and partial guesses, like "It might be rainy," in the KV cache while it generates its response. The larger an AI model's KV cache is, the more information it can keep track of at once and the more powerful it is. A single sentence uses only a few dozen tokens — the building blocks of AI prompts and output text — but storing hundreds of thousands of tokens in the KV cache for more sophisticated work can require tens of gigabytes of memory .…