Comment by pama

Isn’t that the same with most engineering disciplines though? A nuclear engineer cannot build a nuclear power station at home, a chemical engineer or process chemist doesn’t have access to the industrial grade infrastructure outside of their job, a computer hardware architect cannot hope to design hardware at home and fabricate it at 3nm or better at TSMC. I guess that software engineering was more of an exception to this rule for a while because home computers were amazing enough to help build useful software. Even throughout all these years many people worked on parallel code that run on large clusters or infrastructure that was not appropriate for operating at home and now with deep learning a subset of that skill set is very desirable. I agree that additional public contributions to the training process on large clusters would be fantastic; eventually these people will be trained in all the right systems courses and will figure out their way to the jobs where they can apply their skills and grow.