The threat of technological superintelligence is the stuff of science fiction, yet it has become a topic of serious discussion in the past few years. Despite the lack of clear definition-even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called AGI a "weakly defined term"-the idea that powerful AI contains an inherent threat to humanity has gained acceptance among respected cultural critics. Granted, generative AI is a powerful technology that has already had a massive impact on our work and culture.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is the next frontier, Google is surging, and the party scene has gotten completely out of hand. Those were the through lines from this year's NeurIPS in San Diego. NeurIPS, or the "Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems," started in 1987 as a purely academic affair. It has since ballooned alongside the hype around AI into a massive industry event where labs come to recruit and investors come to find the next wave of AI startups.