Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

Post by JyrkiAlakuijala » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

zerobees wrote: post #10

Mindless2112 wrote: post #7

> In this Gemini-reconstructed scene, ... I'm generally pretty pro-AI, but I find this icky. Of course, I wouldn't have noticed except the whiteboard drawing seemed not quite right, so I'll probably be fooled in the future.

Based on what I've heard, Google is monitoring per-org usage and strongly / incessantly encouraging teams to experiment with the technology, so a lot of tokens get spent on pointless stuff like that. The preceding diagram, which is needlessly busy and blurry, appears to be AI-generated too.

Post by JyrkiAlakuijala » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

yboris wrote: post #12

Weird they don't name Jon Sneyers - a person pivotal in creation of JPEG XL Here's a blog post by him: https://cloudinary.com/blog/2026-the-year-of-jpeg-xl

Post by JyrkiAlakuijala » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

qingcharles wrote: post #41

fc417fc802 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as though Google isn't notorious for killing their own successful and well received products for seemingly no reason. It's incontrovertible that Google did attempt to kill browser adoption of jxl at one point. Thankfully they seem to have reversed course.

They only reversed under pressure from the Safari and Firefox folks. The killing of JXL did push the ever-talented Jyrki to create jpegli, which was honestly a wonder.

Post by JyrkiAlakuijala » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

bnolsen wrote: post #22

I personally think something like the qok format is a better way to go. Make something that performs well and is dirt simple to implement.

Post by BugsJustFindMe » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

JyrkiAlakuijala wrote: post #58

apt-get wrote: post #49

The sloppa in this article is... offending. The obvious AI headings, pointless genned image of people (I'm starting to think islam had a point with discouraging depictions of human figures), and especially the blurry, artifacted, distractingly skeuomorphic diagram, with random wire traces going everywhere... this is a technical blog, not an investor sales pitch! Every time I see one of these, I have to double-check f…

I spent 10+ years in building JPEG XL and I'm proud of the result. It wasn't always easy times. It is not so bad people can see what I look like and take a peek what the process was to get there. This article is not about the entropy codes and predictors, memory bandwidth and decision trees, but about the long horizon planning in corporate-driven OSS efforts and being connected to both community and cross-industry.