Rocket AI: 2016's Most Notorious AI Launch and the Problem with AI Hype – The Mission

It's 3 AM on a warm Thursday night in December, a usually quiet street in the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona is bustling with activity, as a cohort of 200 artificial intelligence researchers leave in single-file out of a sprawling yellow mansion. The police count heads as the researchers film the procession on their phones and tweet #rocketai. The guest list looked like the results of a search for most popular AI authors on arXiv. Every major corporate and academic AI lab was in attendance -- Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Facebook AI Research, Google Brain, Stanford University, MIT, U of Montreal, as well as a multitude of other AI start-ups and investors from around the world -- all in town for the 30th annual NIPS conference. NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) has become the academic and industry AI conference, growing near-exponentially over the past decade as corporate sponsors fight to keep the loyalty of their engineers and aggressively recruit others.