The first week of the 35th conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS2021) saw eight fascinating invited talks, tutorials, affinity group workshops, and a new datasets and benchmarks track. There were also poster sessions, oral sessions, competitions, demonstrations, and more. With this compilation of tweets, we look back on the week. "The greatest violence is the product of remoteness from reality" – a great talk by Mary L. Gray, The Banality of Scale: A Theory on the Limits of Modeling Bias and Fairness Frameworks for Social Justice (and other lessons from the Pandemic) at #NeurIPS2021 'How duolingo uses AI to Asses, Engage and Teach Better' session @NeurIPSConf is . The invited talk by @lugosi_gabor at #NeurIPS2021 was very enjoyable and also a little disturbing -- if your data isn't Gaussian (or subgaussian), then even basic things become nontrivial.https://t.co/TPByspYh5T The final #NeurIPS2021 keynote starts soon!

Consequences of Massive Scaling in Machine Learning opening panel #NeurIPS2021 agrees LLMs haven't yet shifted paradigm, but might do so when we find emergent intelligence *without* understanding.