AI’s top research conference morphed into a recruiting extravaganza, summing up a wild 2023

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI.

NeurIPS, the long-running machine learning research conference, wrapped up in New Orleans this past weekend. As you can probably guess, it was an especially buzzy year for the event. More than 16,000 attendees consisting of the world’s top AI researchers and practitioners came together for the six-day conference, and organizers say they received a record number of paper submissions: 13,330 in total, compared to 9,634 received last year.

The 37th annual conference had all the markers of years past, including talks, demonstrations, paper presentations, and an increasing presence of Big Tech. But while it was previously the go-to destination for the latest machine learning research, the recent explosion of interest in AI set a different tone for this year’s conference. The recent breakneck pace of development means that no one has been waiting around for NeurIPS to keep up with, let alone publish, the latest AI research breakthroughs. In fact, with a May deadline for submitting presenting papers, many of them were “ancient news” in the world of machine learning by the time the conference came around, one attendee told The Information. Instead, NeurIPS 2023 was a recruiting frenzy.

Big Tech companies, freshly funded AI startups, financial firms, and even a host of Chinese tech companies swarmed the conference to woo top AI talent. In her dispatch from the event, Semafor Tech and China reporter Louise Matsakis described this year’s NeurIPS as “the hottest event for recruiting AI talent” and said several attendees told her they made the trip specifically in the hopes of landing a job, knowing their skills are in high demand right now as top firms shell out compensation packages that are rich even by Silicon Valley standards. OpenAI, for example, is offering researchers pay packages in the arena of $10 million.

Firms looking to recruit worked every angle. Google sent recruiters to the event, while Sony touted full-time and internship roles listed specifically for NeurIPS attendees. Startups like Perplexity and CentML held flashy happy hours to get researchers in the door, and on LinkedIn, attendees coupled announcements that they’d be at the conference with job listings for open roles and an invitation for candidates to meet up at the event. In a more old-school approach, Matsakis described seeing a recruiter from Tencent hanging up flyers advertising research roles, which were written in both English and Mandarin, and instructed interested applicants to reach out on WeChat. Overall, she said Chinese tech companies and Wall Street trading firms were among the most prominent participants at the conference.

“Their presence shows how intense the competition for AI talent has become,” wrote Matsakis, also noting that “while the narrative in Washington is that the U.S. and China are decoupling their technology ecosystems, AI researchers from both countries are still engaging in plenty of mutually beneficial collaboration.”

Job hunting and recruiting aren’t necessarily new for NeurIPS—PhD researchers in particular have always looked to the conference to promote their research and score tenure-track positions, and tech companies have increasingly turned their attention to the event over the last decade or so as well. The release of ChatGPT, however, took AI mainstream, positioned it as the next big business opportunity, and sent unprepared companies sprinting head-first into the AI era. Aside from models, data, compute, and all the technical makings of AI, these firms need AI talent above all, and NeurIPS has all the best in one place.

I’m not one for technology predictions (and folks certainly are making a lot of them as 2023 comes to a close), but I bet we’ll see some high-profile AI hires early on in the new year as connections made at NeurIPS bear fruit. After all, there’s no sign of this talent war slowing down. Even the U.S. government, which has been scrambling to hire over 400 chief AI officers (CAIOs) by the end of the year, is citing the stiff competition and significantly higher compensation from the public sector as its main hurdle.

And with that, here’s the rest of this week’s AI news.

Sage Lazzaro
sage.lazzaro@consultant.fortune.com
sagelazzaro.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com