how to party like an AI researcher - by Jasmine Sun

it’s weird to see tech reporters posting about attending NeurIPS - surely, they must have something better to do than chase gossip at an ostensibly technical conference — Peyman Milanfar, Distinguished Scientist at Google, Fellow of the IEEE In 1987, roughly 600 renegade physicists, neuroscientists, and engineers gathered in Denver, Colorado to discuss experimental computer architectures based on the human brain. At the time, “neural networks” were still a fringe research area: brittle rule-based systems still dominated the AI mainstream, while backpropagation had only just been reintroduced in 1986. This was the first Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.1 Today, NeurIPS is over forty times larger, and looks less like a kooky pirate crew than a cornucopic symbol of the swelling field overtaking CS departments, the tech industry, and the US economy too. A record 26,382 people have registered for NeurIPS 2025, nearly all in San Diego, with two tiny satellites in Me

it’s weird to see tech reporters posting about attending NeurIPS - surely, they must have something better to do than chase gossip at an ostensibly technical conference — Peyman Milanfar, Distinguished Scientist at Google, Fellow of the IEEE In 1987, roughly 600 renegade physicists, neuroscientists, and engineers gathered in Denver, Colorado to discuss experimental computer architectures based on the human brain. At the time, “neural networks” were still a fringe research area: brittle rule-based systems still dominated the AI mainstream, while backpropagation had only just been reintroduced i