Isn't this just quantization with extra steps? Can converting the text to an image really be a better way to lossily compress it? (Not that I have any idea what I'm talking about on this topic.)

I also have no idea what I'm talking about, but to me this seems closer to the "caveman mode" that some people use to compress info into fewer tokens. Going through the image tokenizer allows you to leave the source text untouched while still gaining (some of?) the benefits