NeurIPS, the ‘AI Olympics’, gets new hurdles in Canada with US-China tech competition

An annual gathering of the world’s top minds in artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining wider attention as it emerges as the new battleground in the competition between the US and China, according to event attendees.

The six-day Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, wrapped last week in Vancouver, Canada, and attracted more than 16,000 participants, with Chinese AI researchers and technology firms making up a notable portion of attendees amid strained ties with Western countries in the field.

Liu Feng attended NeurIPS for the third time this year. The assistant professor in machine learning at the University of Melbourne told the Post on Friday that the “Asian appearance” of the event was noticeably greater this year than in the past.

Chinese universities made up eight of the top 20 institutions with the most accepted papers, according to Paper Copilot, a website that tracks conference papers. That was up from four Chinese institutions last year. One of the two submissions to be awarded best paper went to a team of researchers from China’s Peking University and TikTok parent ByteDance.

Meanwhile, Zhejiang University unseated the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become the institution with most papers accepted this year, according to Paper Copilot.

Paper Copilot founder Yang Jing, who is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, said that since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, his project has tracked growing participation from Chinese scholars across various AI disciplines, including large language models and embodied intelligence.