The Hottest AI Research: Cutting Costs; OpenAI Director Says AGI in Five to 15 Years

Machine learning conferences used to be about pushing boundaries and thinking outside the box. These days, they’re focused on practicality and helping businesses cut the cost of running artificial intelligence.

Take the International Conference on Machine Learning, or ICML, in Vienna last week, where the desire to lower AI costs seemed front of mind, some attendees told me.

On the bright side, much of this research is cheaper to do than building large language models, so more academic labs can participate in the race, not just well-resourced firms such as OpenAI. But some attendees said they longed for yesteryear, when such events focused on bleeding-edge research outside of generative AI.