This year’s Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) drew more than 16,000 participants in Vancouver, Canada. As the event continues to gain traction, it stands as a testament to the escalating competition between the US and China in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI).

Among the attendees was Liu Feng, an assistant professor in machine learning at the University of Melbourne, who noted that there was a marked increase in Asian participation compared to previous years. He stated, ‘The Asian appearance of the event was noticeably greater this year than in the past.’

With Chinese universities significantly represented, eight of the top 20 institutions with the most accepted papers hailed from China, up from four in the previous year. A team from Peking University and ByteDance was recognized with one of two awards for best paper.

Yang Jing, founder of Paper Copilot, pointed out a trend since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022 leading to increased participation from Chinese scholars across various AI fields, including large language models and embodied intelligence.