If Google’s AI researchers had a sense of humor, they would have called TurboQuant, the new, ultra-efficient AI memory compression algorithm announced Tuesday, “Pied Piper” — or, at least that’s what the internet thinks.

The joke is a reference to the fictional startup Pied Piper that was the focus of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” TV series that ran from 2014 to 2019.

The show followed the startup’s founders as they navigated the tech ecosystem, facing challenges like competition from larger companies, fundraising, technology and product issues, and even (much to our delight) wowing the judges at a fictional version of TechCrunch Disrupt.

Pied Piper’s breakthrough technology on the TV show was a compression algorithm that greatly reduced file sizes with near-lossless compression. Google Research’s new TurboQuant, is also about extreme compression without quality loss, but applied to a core bottleneck in AI systems. Hence, the comparisons.

> So Google TurboQuant is basically Pied Piper and just hit a Weismann Score of 5.2 https://t.co/WievkwijjD pic.twitter.com/4rirvu2YyV

— K A L E O (@CryptoKaleo) March 25, 2026

Google Research described the technology as a novel way to shrink AI’s working memory without impacting performance. The compression method, which uses a form of vector quantization to clear cache bottlenecks in AI processing, would essentially allow AI to remember more information while taking up less space and maintaining accuracy, according to the researchers.

They plan to present their findings at the ICLR 2026 conference next month, along with the two methods that are making this compression possible: the quantization method PolarQuant and a training and optimization method called QJL.

> TurboQuant is the new Pied Piper 🤣 pic.twitter.com/iMAYJs02zt

— Justin Trimble (@justintrimble) March 25, 2026

> So basically TurboQuant is Pied Piper https://t.co/Zx9Oq84tSL pic.twitter.com/JPZjz8M3Wp

— Shivang (@whyshivang) March 25, 2026

Understanding the math involved here is something researchers and computer scientists may be able to do, but the results are exciting the wider tech industry as a whole.

If successfully implemented in the real world, TurboQuant could make AI cheaper to run by reducing its runtime “working memory” — known as the KV cache — by “at least 6x.”

Some, like Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, are even calling this Google’s DeepSeek moment — a reference to the efficiency gains driven by the Chinese AI model, which was trained at a fraction of the cost of its rivals on worse chips, while remaining competitive on its results.

> This is Google’s DeepSeek. So much more room to optimize AI inference for speed, memory usage, power consumption, and multi-tenant utilization. Lots of teams at @Cloudflare focused on these areas. #staytuned https://t.co/hHoY4sLT2I

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) March 25, 2026

> Well, we all know who stole the Pied Piper codebase now https://t.co/Inv0nlMYnP

— Monali (@monali_dambre) March 25, 2026

Still, it’s worth noting that TurboQuant hasn’t yet been deployed broadly; it’s still a lab breakthrough at this time.

That makes comparisons with something like DeepSeek, or even the fictional Pied Piper, more difficult. On TV, Pied Piper’s technology was going to radically change the rules of computing. TurboQuant, meanwhile, could lead to efficiency gains and systems that require less memory during inference. But it wouldn’t necessarily solve the wider RAM shortages driven by AI, given that it only targets inference memory, not training — the latter of which continues to require massive amounts of RAM.

> Pied Piper would have been a better name https://t.co/qNZmtANFhs

— Joe (@JoeBGrech) March 25, 2026

Topics

AI, AI, Google, pied piper, turboquant

Sarah Perez

Consumer News Editor

Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.

You can contact or verify outreach from Sarah by emailing sarahp@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at sarahperez.01 on Signal.

View Bio

June 9

Boston, MA

Actively scaling? Fundraising? Planning your next launch?

TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 delivers tactical playbooks and direct access to 1,000+ founders and investors who are building, backing, and closing.

Google unveils TurboQuant, a new AI memory compression algorithm — and yes, the internet is calling it 'Pied Piper'