As the tech industry slowed down for the holidays, thousands of artificial intelligence researchers, engineers, founders and investors revved up in New Orleans at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems—NeurIPS for short.
While researchers presented papers on large language models and diffusion models underlying image generators like Dall-E, attendees we spoke to said they weren’t there for the research. To be featured at NeurIPS, papers had to be submitted by May, making them ancient news in the world of machine learning, one attendee said.
Instead, many conference-goers focused on another key priority: recruiting. Big AI firms such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind have historically used the event to attract recruits, but the attendees I spoke with said they were shocked at how many freshly-funded startups were doing the same this year.
With OpenAI having recently offered up to $10 million in compensation packages to entice rare talent, the younger startups had to stand out in other ways. Upstarts such as Perplexity, CentML and Imbue, which have collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars, held flashy happy hours for engineers alongside their bigger rivals.
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