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The Hardware Lottery

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arxiv 2009.06489 v2 pith:W3SABKWQ submitted 2020-09-14 cs.CY cs.AIcs.ARcs.LG

Sara Hooker This is my paper · ORCID
classification cs.CYcs.AIcs.ARcs.LG
keywords hardwareresearchideasprogressbecausedirectionsessaygiven
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

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Hardware, systems and algorithms research communities have historically had different incentive structures and fluctuating motivation to engage with each other explicitly. This historical treatment is odd given that hardware and software have frequently determined which research ideas succeed (and fail). This essay introduces the term hardware lottery to describe when a research idea wins because it is suited to the available software and hardware and not because the idea is superior to alternative research directions. Examples from early computer science history illustrate how hardware lotteries can delay research progress by casting successful ideas as failures. These lessons are particularly salient given the advent of domain specialized hardware which make it increasingly costly to stray off of the beaten path of research ideas. This essay posits that the gains from progress in computing are likely to become even more uneven, with certain research directions moving into the fast-lane while progress on others is further obstructed.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

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  4. Scaling Deep Learning Training with MPMD Pipeline Parallelism

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    JaxPP introduces a user-defined MPMD pipeline schedule API on top of JAX/GSPMD and reports throughput gains up to 1.11x over SPMD training on H100 clusters.

  5. Grounded world models in biological organisms and future embodied AI

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    Biological intelligence builds grounded world models through sensorimotor interaction and attaches language later, the opposite of language-first AI training.

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