Hardware, systems and algorithms research communities have           historically had different incentive structures and fluctuating

The Hardware Lottery

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2023-02-04 19:00:10

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 universally superior to alternative research directions. History tells us that hardware lotteries can obfuscate research progress by casting successful ideas as failures and can delay signaling that some research directions are far more promising than others.

These lessons are particularly salient as we move into a new era of closer collaboration between hardware, software and machine learning research communities. After decades of treating hardware, software and algorithms as separate choices, the catalysts for closer collaboration include changing hardware economics , a “bigger is better” race in the size of deep learning architectures and the dizzying requirements of deploying machine learning to edge devices.

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