SAN DIEGO — For the past week, academics, startup founders and researchers representing industrial titans from around the globe descended on sunny San Diego for the top gathering in the field of artificial intelligence.

The Neural Information Processing Systems , or NeurIPS, conference has been held for 39 years, but it drew a record-breaking 26,000 attendees this year, twice as many as just six years ago.

Since its founding in 1987 , NeurIPS has been devoted to researching neural networks and the interplay among computation, neurobiology and physics. While neural networks, computational structures inspired by human and animal cognitive systems, were once an esoteric academic fixation, their role underpinning AI systems has transformed NeurIPS from a niche meeting in a Colorado hotel

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