The De-democratization of AI: Deep Learning and the Compute Divide in Artificial Intelligence Research

Understand

Increasingly, modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) research has become more computationally intensive.

• However, a growing concern is that due to unequal access to computing power, only certain firms and elite universities have advantages in modern AI research.
• Using a novel dataset of 171394 papers from 57 prestigious computer science conferences, we document that firms, in particular, large technology firms and elite universities have increased participation in major AI conferences since deep learning's unanticipated rise in 2012.
• The effect is concentrated among elite universities, which are ranked 1-50 in the QS World University Rankings.