[mpascale00]

Certainly other field are competitive, but the current AI boom has been ridiculous for a while now. As an outside observer, the competition seems to be for the final money, prestige, or whatever the top papers win, rather than competition at the level of paper acceptance...

[bonoboTP]

The competition racket and inflation keeps turning. It used to be publications. Then it was top conference publications. Now it's going viral on social media, being popularized by big AI aggregators like AK.

It's crazy, most Master's students applying for a PhD position already come with multiple top conference papers, which a few years ago would get you like 2/3 of the way to the PhD, and now it just gets you a foot in the door in applying to start a PhD. And then already Bachelor students are expected to publish to get a good spot in a lab to do their Master thesis or internship. And NeurIPS has a track for high school students to write papers, which - I assume - will boost their applications to start university. This type of hustle has been common in many East Asian countries and is getting globalized.

[ivape]

That whole thing feels like a crypto coin, as in, its currency that’s worth something to just that particular group. The industry obviously doesn’t care about all these papers, so the question is, what is the social structure where these papers provide status and respect (who values their currency?).