At record 26,000-person NeurIPS conference in San Diego, leading AI researchers admit they don't understand how frontier AI systems actually work; Google shifts to practical approach while OpenAI doubles down on ambitious reverse-engineering.

At AI’s biggest gathering, its inner workings remain a mystery

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 i...