Resource Democratization: Is Compute the Binding Constraint on AI Research?

Access to compute is widely viewed as a primary barrier to AI research progress. Compute resource disparities between academic and industry researchers is therefore a source of concern. Yet the experiences of researchers who might encounter resource constraints in their work have received no direct study. We addressed this gap by conducting a large survey of U.S. AI researchers that posed questions about project inputs, outcomes, and challenges. Contrary to popular narratives, responses from more than 500 participants revealed more concern about talent and data limitations than compute access. There were few differences between academic and industry researchers in this regard. The exception were researchers who already use large amounts of compute, and expressed a need for more. These findings suggest that interventions to subsidize compute without addressing the limitations on talent and data availability reported by our respondents might cause or exacerbate commonly cited resource inequalities, with unknown impact on the future of equitable research.