The Hardware Lottery: George Gilder, an American investor, power-fully described the computer chip as “inscribing worlds on grains of sand” (Gilder, 2000).The performance of an algorithm is fundamentally intertwined with the hardware and software it runs on. This essay proposes the term hardware lottery to describe how these downstream choices determine whether a research idea succeeds or fails. Today the hardware landscape is increasingly heterogeneous. This essay posits that the hardware lottery has not gone away, and the gap between the winners and losers will grow increasingly larger. In order to avoid future hardware lotteries, we need to make it easier to quantify the opportunity cost of settling for the hardware and software we have. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.06489.pdf
