NeurIPS Conference: When AI Competes Taylor Swift's Popularity

One of the sessions at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Conference was again held in Vancouver (photo: x @NeurIPSConf)

JAKARTA The annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference was again held in Vancouver, British Columbia, with the interest of more than 16,000 computer scientists, researchers, and artificial intelligence (AI) fans. The event, which is now the biggest event in the AI sector, features innovations and discussions that have the potential to change the future of global technology and economy.

NeurIPS, which began in 1987 as a small gathering of academics, has now grown into a major stage for big tech companies to showcase their breakthroughs while attracting the attention of the academic community and investors.

Some of the main characters in the AI field share their vision. Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI chief scientist, stressed that the more AI can escape, the more unexpected the outcome will be. Meanwhile, Stanford's Fei-Fei Li proposed that the next step in AI development is adopting "spatial intelligence" or spatial intelligence, which goes beyond traditional 2D data and exploits 3D-based understanding.

"Relying on 2D data from the internet, it's like building an AI for a flat world," he said.

The popularity of AI MelejitAcara this year was colored by the presence of giant companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft, which launched announcements related to their AI along with conference dates. In fact, the implementation of this conference was pushed back a day to avoid clashes with Taylor Swift's concert, which also took place in Vancouver.

The number of research papers received in this conference has increased tenfold compared to a decade ago. This year, a big focus exists on better AI measurements and evaluations. One of the winning papers introduces an AI model capable of iteratively predicting high-resolution images.

However, this excitement atmosphere also shows the impact of massive commercialization. Yann LeCun, one of the "father of AI" and chief scientist of AI Meta, recalled the early era of NeurIPS when only a few hundred academics knew each other were present with small posters to discuss until late at night. Now, he can no longer walk without a selfie request from the participants.

Investors and the Young Generation Participate in the Role of investors becoming increasingly dominant, with the presence of venture capital companies such as NEA and Greylock holding special parties to attract the attention of the academic community. Even event sponsors have jumped dramatically, from just nine in 2006 to more than 120 this year, with the diamond' sponsorship category introduced since 2022.

Interestingly, this year's youngest participant is Harini Shravan, a 10-year-old from India, who presented her paper on adapting an ancient 3,000-year-old story to a musical with the help of an AI tool.

The "Pedas" View of AIJeff Dean's Future, chief Google DeepMind scientist, talks about the importance of modularity in the future AI model architecture. "Models should be more modular, sparsely used, and rather convoluted," he said. He called this a pedas' view of AI evolution.

With rapid development and growing interest, NeurIPS is not only a place to share knowledge, but also a symbol of AI's influence that is increasingly dominating the world of technology and even competes with the appeal of a superstar like Taylor Swift.