The Hardware Lottery · HackerPapers discussions

The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by swyx

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:57:29 GMT

> If you can see that these models empirically get better with scale, why would you swap the main architecture? Those events will be pretty rare c.f. hardware lotter https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489

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The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by unmole

Thu, 28 May 2026 15:10:00 GMT

You're describing The Hardware Lottery: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489

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The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by arjie

Fri, 22 May 2026 07:01:57 GMT

It’s a well-known paper. The link at the top to the PDF works well https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.06489

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The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by ssivark

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 19:56:00 GMT

Check out The hardware lottery [1], which drove a lot of discussion a few years ago. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489

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The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by jwuphysics

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 18:45:20 GMT

Hi Jeremy & Eric, great to see your newest endeavor. I hope that Answer.AI builds on the success and impact that fast.ai has already enjoyed. Given new developments in hardware (by companies not named NVIDIA), I'm wondering if you are keen on exploring the next generation of model architectures and optimization procedures that might exploit newer hardware. In other words, will research directions pivot based on the hardware lottery?[1] Are you in conversations with companies developing these alternative chips? [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489

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The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by dkislyuk

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 16:27:40 GMT

In the current world, deep learning with homogeneous computation graphs, tuned with backprop, has won the Hardware Lottery [1]. This is unfortunate for research outside of that area, but just looking at the momentum of development it seems like a sure bet to keep investing in GPU-based training and inference for the next decade. There's just too much lock-in already to this paradigm. If a new algorithm appears from with a novel approach (analog compute, heterogeneous computation graphs from genetic algorithms, quantum, much more...), there will be a whole generation of R&D + tool + framework…

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The Hardware Lottery — HN submission

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 15:54:54 GMT

The Hardware Lottery

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by GregarianChild

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 15:55:07 GMT

Exactly. It's easy to see in retrospect, but hard in prospect: the original paper [1] on GPU acceleration of NNs reports a measly 20x speedup. Assuming a bit of cherry-picking on the author's side to make get the paper published, the 'real-world speedup' will have been assumed by the readership to be less. But this triggered a virtuos cycle of continuous improvements at all levels that has been dubbed "winning the hardware lottery" [2]. [1] K.-S. Oh, K. Jung, GPU implementation of neural networks. [2] S. Hooker, The Hardware Lottery. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489

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The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by awegio

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 11:35:36 GMT

Related: The Hardware Lottery (https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489) It goes both ways: processors are built to accelerate existing applications, and applications are built to run with the constraints of the hardware. This holds back progress towards better systems where both new kind of hardware and software is required. This is part of the reason why research into neural networks was so slow for a long time, and took off only after GPUs for 3d graphics came around.

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The Hardware Lottery — HN submission

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 11:49:47 GMT

The Hardware Lottery (2020)

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by dekhn

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 17:28:58 GMT

Because I used to work at Google on TPUs with all the teams (from ads to Physics), and have about 30 years experience in high performance computing. Neural nets and DL are just one of the reasons to use TPUs; in the future, they might not even be the preeminent approach. DL is just one part of the much larger world of HPC, it's been very effective, but I expect that as things evolve people will rediscover the value of deep precision. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06489

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The Hardware Lottery — mentioned by sdenton4

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 22:43:13 GMT

Here's the 'Hardware Lottery' essay that this refers to: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.06489.pdf "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…

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The Hardware Lottery — HN submission

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 21:20:37 GMT

The Hardware Lottery

4 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

The Hardware Lottery — HN submission

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 10:31:57 GMT

The Hardware Lottery

73 points; 16 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

The Hardware Lottery — HN submission

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:46:07 GMT

The Hardware Lottery

7 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.