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


SOURCE: SCMP.COM
DEC 20, 2024

Ben Jiang in Beijing

Published: 21 Dec 2024

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.

“It’s like a global [AI] arms race among countries,” Yang said.

The 37-year-old academic event has taken on greater significance since the release of ChatGPT led to a surge in AI research and development. Generative AI has catalysed global competition in both academic and corporate settings, with the US and China leading the race.

How does China’s AI stack up against ChatGPT?

The non-profit NeurIPS Foundation organises the event to foster the exchange of research advances in AI and machine learning, a branch of AI that enables computers to imitate the way humans learn without explicit programming.

Not all Chinese AI scholars who were invited were able to attend, as some could not secure visas for the trip.

One graduate from Nanjing University of Science and Technology in eastern Jiangsu province and another from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou – schools that have been placed on the US Department of Commerce’s Entity List and Unverified List, respectively – said they had to forfeit their planned trip because of the “security check” process during the visa application. The researchers asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.

The Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the government agency that oversees visa issuance, said in a statement that it works closely with the Canada Border Services Agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Services and “our closest international partners to carry out comprehensive security screening” to help mitigate potential risks.

“Background screening is an important part of the overall assessment of whether a person is admissible to Canada,” the agency said, without elaborating on whether US sanctions played a role in its visa policies for Chinese scholars.

Chinese companies also increased their presence at the event this year. ByteDance was a diamond sponsor – the top-level sponsorship – alongside US tech giants Google, Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Apple, as they all jostled to attract top AI talent.

Other sponsors from China include Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud unit, its fintech affiliate Ant Group, internet search giant Baidu, and US-sanctioned telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies. Alibaba owns the Post.

Chinese social media giant Tencent Holdings said it would be hosting a tech gala at a venue close to the event, with special sessions for talent to talk to recruiters. ByteDance’s team working on Doubao, a popular Chinese chatbot, was also actively seeking up-and-coming AI researchers, sending a barrage of emails as part of its outreach effort, according to recipients and a screenshot of one email seen by the Post.

In their email, the Doubao team requested one-on-one meetings with attendees, saying it is “crafting the industry’s most advanced AI foundational models” and “aspires to become a world-class research team”.

ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Ben Jiang

Ben is a Beijing-based technology reporter for the Post focusing on emerging start-ups. He has previously covered Chinese tech for publications including KrAsia and TechNode.