Social and Governance Implications of Improved Data Efficiency

Understand

Many researchers work on improving the data efficiency of machine learning.

• What would happen if they succeed? This paper explores the social-economic impact of increased data efficiency.
• Specifically, we examine the intuition that data efficiency will erode the barriers to entry protecting incumbent data-rich AI firms, exposing them to more competition from data-poor firms.
• We find that this intuition is only partially correct: data efficiency makes it easier to create ML applications, but large AI firms may have more to gain from higher performing AI systems.