To use an analogy: Imagine a spreadsheet with 500 smoothie recipes one in each row, each with a dozen ingredients as the columns.

Now imagine you discover that all 500 are really just the same 11 base ingredients plus something extra.

What they've done here is use SVD, (which is normally used for image compression and noise reduction), to find that "base recipe". Now we can reproduce those other recipes by only recording the one igredient that differs.

More interestingly it might tell us something new about smoothies in general to know that they all share a common base. Maybe we can even build a simpler base using this info.

At least in theory. The code hasn't actually been released yet.

https://toshi2k2.github.io/unisub/#key-insights

Yeah that's pretty much how I understood it. Good analogy. We are finding the French Mother Sauce. Reading the comments it seems everyone is still clear on the practical implications of that.