People store large quantities of data in their electronic devices and transfer some of this data to others, whether for professional or personal reasons. Data compression methods are thus of the utmost importance, as they can boost the efficiency of devices and communications, making users less reliant on cloud data services and external storage devices.
I think the idea is to have compressor and decompressor use the exact same neural network. Looks like arithmetic coding with a learned function.
But yes model size is probably going to be an issue.