How Compute Divide Leads To Discrimination In AI Research

Science doesn't discriminate, but probably technology does, at least in terms of accessibility. New research has found that the unequal distribution of compute power in academia is promoting inequality in the era of deep learning. The study conducted jointly by AI researchers from Virginia Tech and Western University found that this de-democratisation of AI has pushed people to leave academia and opt for high-paying industry jobs. The study found that the amount of compute power at elite universities, ranked among top 50 as per QS World University Rankings, is much more than at mid-to-low tier institutions. For the research, authors analysed over 170,000 papers presented across 60 prestigious computer science conferences such as ACL, ICML, and NeurIPS in categories like computer vision, data mining, NLP, and machine learning.