Expecting 2 years of research by around 20 of the best DNN researchers on the planet to be compressed into a StackOverflow answer before it has been done seems a fairly large amount to expect.
Not a huge fan of the negativity on StackOverflow, but until August 2016 (when the paper this was based on was published - or maybe 2015, with DRAW[2]) people actively working in this area didn't think it was possible.
Also, the single answer there certainly didn't say anything like it was a stupid idea. I don't think the author of that answer knew much about autoencoders.
Also^2, your question isn't really anything like what this addresses. Your question concentrates on the idea of compressing a large set of images, and sharing some kind of representation.
That certainly is possible without using a ML approach. And yes, autoencoders have been around for a long time.
But hoverboards are a great idea, too.
[1] This paper has 7 authors, Gregor et al has 5 authors, DRAW has 6.
Not a huge fan of the negativity on StackOverflow, but until August 2016 (when the paper this was based on was published - or maybe 2015, with DRAW[2]) people actively working in this area didn't think it was possible.
Also, the single answer there certainly didn't say anything like it was a stupid idea. I don't think the author of that answer knew much about autoencoders.
Also^2, your question isn't really anything like what this addresses. Your question concentrates on the idea of compressing a large set of images, and sharing some kind of representation.
That certainly is possible without using a ML approach. And yes, autoencoders have been around for a long time.
But hoverboards are a great idea, too.
[1] This paper has 7 authors, Gregor et al has 5 authors, DRAW has 6.
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04623v2.pdf