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NeurIPS attracts over 16,000 attendees, highlighting AI's

growing influence

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Major tech firms align AI announcements with NeurIPS dates

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AI research sees surge in submissions, interest in

evaluation

and measurement

By Jeffrey Dastin, Kenrick Cai and Anna Tong

VANCOUVER, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Deep in the cavernous

convention center here, on math-filled posters or in spirited

conversations, could be a breakthrough for artificial

intelligence in the making.

More than 16,000 computer scientists and fellow travelers

gathered in British Columbia over the past week for what has

become AI's biggest annual event: NeurIPS, or the Conference on

Neural Information Processing Systems.

Long toiling in obscurity, AI's brightest minds have

convened at the event since 1987, for years in Denver, then in

Vancouver and other cities. More recently these researchers have

emerged as industry sensations helping drive the future of

technology and the global economy.

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 OpenAI's chief

scientist.

"The new ladder to climb," said Stanford's Fei-Fei Li, "is

the 3D ladder, which I call spatial intelligence." She said

relying on 2D data from the internet was like building AI for a

"flat earth."

The conference is nothing like the intimate affair it was

decades ago, when a field of outliers could fit into a hotel

bar. It has become fertile ground for corporations to tout their

wares and draw academics into newly lucrative business. Meta

Platforms ( META ) CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed up in 2013,

attendees recalled.

This year, major companies Alphabet, Meta and

Microsoft ( MSFT ) timed AI news to the event. The crowds were

so massive that NeurIPS began a day later than usual, so AI

scientists would not fight for hotel rooms the same night as a

Taylor Swift concert.

By Friday, with two days of events still ahead, the men's

restroom near a principal entrance had three of four urinals

broken, covered in plastic from apparent overuse.

'TWISTY AND TANGLY'

Conference old-timers such as AI "godfather" Yann LeCun

reflected on a bygone era. Several hundred academics, almost all

familiar faces, used to display posters on topics like Bayesian

statistics and debate them at a Vancouver Hyatt late into the

night, attendees remembered.

LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, remarked to reporters that

he no longer could peruse these posters that have been a

mainstay. He would be stopped by requests for a selfie at every

step.

Money has transformed that quaint era. Venture capitalists

and other investors descended on the academic affair, with some

firms such as NEA and Greylock hosting after parties for the

first time.

Where there were nine sponsors of the 2006 conference, this

year garnered over 120, the NeurIPS website showed. A new

"diamond" tier appeared in 2022, the year that some attendees

pegged as the euphoria peak. OpenAI launched ChatGPT during

those conference dates.

At the booth of diamond sponsor Google DeepMind, chief

scientist Jeff Dean thanked attendees for listening to him

through "weird headphones" connected to a microphone so he could

reach them despite exhibition hall noise.

Ten times more research papers were accepted at this year's

conference compared to a decade ago. David Ha, co-founder of

startup Sakana AI, said he saw a huge uptick in new schemes for

test-time compute to counteract exorbitant costs and technical

snags as models scale up to become ever larger.

Microsoft Research's Hanna Wallach said improving AI

evaluations and measurement science was in greater focus this

year. One winning paper proposed an AI model that predicts

images at higher resolutions iteratively. China's ByteDance, the

parent company of TikTok, has reportedly sued that paper's

co-author, its former intern.

A 10-year-old, Harini Shravan, was the youngest person ever

to have a paper accepted at NeurIPS. She attended from India,

with her parents, and used AI tools to fashion a 3,000-year-old

tale into a musical.

And Dean said at a crowded event on the sidelines that AI

"models should be much more modular, and sparse, and kind of

twisty and tangly than the current model architectures."

That, he said, was his "spicy" view.