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NeurIPS, the convention of the best in AI, reflects the growing rise of the sector
More than 16,000 computer scientists and fellow travelers gathered last week for what became the largest annual AI event: NeurIPS, or the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.
The event, unfolding in the depths of Canada’s cavernous British Columbia convention centre, on math-filled billboards or animated conversations, could be a breakthrough for artificial intelligence (AI).
The brightest minds in AI, long working in obscurity, have gathered at this event since 1987, which over the years has hosted Denver, Vancouver and other cities.
More recently, these researchers have emerged as industry sensations helping to drive the future of technology and the global economy.
The rock stars of the field told their budding compatriots, packed into an exhibition hall last week, how they saw the future of AI. “The more it reasons, the more unpredictable it becomes,” said Ilya Sutskever, until recently chief scientist at OpenAI.
“The new ladder to climb,” said Fei-Fei Li of Stanford, “is the 3D ladder, which I call spatial intelligence.” He said that relying on 2D data from the Internet was like building AI for a “flat earth.”
The conference is nothing like the intimate event it was decades ago, when a field of outliers fit into a hotel bar. It became fertile ground for corporations to promote their products and lure academics into lucrative new businesses. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed up in 2013, attendees recalled.
This year, major companies Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft scheduled AI news for the event. The crowds were so large that NeurIPS started a day later than usual, so that AI scientists wouldn’t be fighting for hotel rooms on the same night as a Taylor Swift concert.
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NeurIPS veterans say money transformed AI
On Friday, with two days of events still ahead, the men’s bathroom near a main entrance had three of four urinals broken, covered in plastic from apparent overuse.
Conference veterans, like AI “godfather” Yann LeCun, reflected on a bygone era. Several hundred academics, almost all familiar faces, used to hold up posters on topics such as Bayesian statistics and discuss them at a Vancouver Hyatt late into the night, attendees recalled.
LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, told reporters that he could no longer examine these once-mainstay posters. He was stopped by requests for a selfie at every turn.
Money transformed that picturesque era. Venture capitalists and other investors pounced on the academic event, and some companies like NEA and Greylock hosted afterparties for the first time.
While there were nine sponsors of the 2006 conference, this year it brought together more than 120, the NeurIPS website showed. A new “diamond” level appeared in 2022, the year that some attendees pointed to as the peak of euphoria. OpenAI launched ChatGPT during those conference dates.
At diamond sponsor Google DeepMind’s booth, chief scientist Jeff Dean thanked attendees for listening to him through “weird headphones” connected to a microphone so he could communicate with them despite the noise of the exhibit hall.
Ten times as many research papers were accepted at this year’s conference compared to a decade ago. David Ha, co-founder of startup Sakana AI, said he has seen a huge rise in new schemes for test-time computing to counter exorbitant costs and technical issues as models scale up to become larger and larger.
Microsoft Research’s Hanna Wallach said improving AI assessments and measurement science was a bigger focus this year. One winning paper proposed an AI model that iteratively predicts images at higher resolutions. China’s ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is reportedly suing the co-author of that article, its former intern.
A 10-year-old girl, Harini Shravan, was the youngest person to have a paper accepted into NeurIPS. He attended from India, with his parents, and used artificial intelligence tools to turn a 3,000-year-old tale into a musical.
And Dean said at a packed event on the sidelines that “AI models should be much more modular, more dispersed, and somewhat twisted and tangled than current model architectures.”
With information from Reuters.
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NeurIPS, the convention of the best in AI, reflects the growing rise of the sector
Forbes Staff
