If it was up to Google’s engineers, that may be the case. Last week week Google announced a new image file format titled “WebP”. With approximately 65% of the the traffic over the web being from image files, the claimed 40% reduction in file size could cut down bandwidth needs and load times. Google has setup a test gallery comparing these two formats located here: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/gallery.
While it certainly won’t make any immediate inroads into the consumer market based on the current standardization on the JPEG format, web files and search related items could benefit from supporting this new standard.