Not trolling, but I'd bet something that's augmented with generative AI. Not to the level of describing scenes with words, but context-aware interpolation.

I don't want my video decoder inventing details which aren't there. I much rather want obvious compression artifacts than a codec where the "compression artifacts" look like perfectly realistic, high-quality hallucinated details.

AI embeddings can be seen as a very advanced form of lossy compression

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/rtx-video-super-resolution/

We already have some of the stepping stones for this. But honestly much better for upscaling poor quality streams vs just gives things a weird feeling when it is a better quality stream.

for sure. macroblock hinting seems like a good place for research.