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Comment by d_burfoot | Hacker News Reader

> ... 2010. Before nobody believed that backprop can be GPU-accelerated.

When I was doing my master's in 2004-06, I talked to a guy whose MSc thesis was about running NNs with GPUs. My thought was: you're going to spend a TON of time fiddling with hacky systems code like CUDA, to get basically a minor 2x or 4x improvement in training time, for a type of ML algorithm that wasn't even that useful: in that era the SVM was generally considered to be superior to NNs.

So it wasn't that people thought it couldn't be done, it's that nobody saw why this would be worthwhile. Nobody was going around saying, "IF ONLY we could spend 20x more compute training our NNs, then they would be amazingly powerful".

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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

I went to a talk on "general purpose GPU programming" at the Colorado School of Mines around 2001 that covered exactly that topic. It was very disappointing to have my interest in FPGAs for this purpose be so entirely destroyed by a quirk of graphics card design.

Hinton also addressed the contribution of hardware performance advances to practical deep neural net applications in his talks in the mid-2000s.

As recent as 2012, I was working for a major US investment and financial services bank (one of the very big ones). An algo dev sent his resignation email to a mailing list with all technologists at the firm, stating he was resigning because they weren't taking FPGA's seriously. Yes, it was very unprofessional, but his statement about "let's see who is proved right" seems to be accurate.

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