It’s privileged to serve on the program committee for ICML 2025. my second time attending a conf at Vancouver Convention Centre, the last was NeurIPS 2019, right before the pandemic. Same venue, diff conf, and a diff time: the field has shifted from NLP to LLMs. What’s next?
ICML, along with ICLR and NeurIPS, is considered one of the top three conferences in machine learning. ICML thoughtfully added a “Reviewer” titled badge for those helping with paper reviews.
The venue was the Vancouver Convention Centre. The last time I was here was for NeurIPS 2019, right before pandemic. Although it's the same venue, the conference topics have shifted from NLP to LLMs.
Noticed that attendees, whether students job-hunting or companies and universities recruiting, were actively networking.
During ICML, I received DMs from several executives at different companies. Many mentioned they had read my blog "LLM Native Primitives: Next Golden Path". I'm happy that my sharing resonated and was recognized to some extent in the industry.
Some Numbers
Number of submitted and accepted papers: 12,468 submissions (32%+ 2024's 9,473); 3,333 accepted in total
Main track
12,107 submissions; 3,260 accepted (27%); 108 orals, 213 spotlights
155 senior area chairs; 1,133 area chairs; 10,733 reviewers
45,610 reviews
Position paper track
361 submissions; 73 accepted (20%); 12 orals, 12 spotlights
2 track chairs; 34 area chairs; 400 reviewers
1,333 reviews
Top 20 primary subject areas of accepted papers: deep learning: large language models shows 438 frequency.
Exhibitors Highlights
Amazon's booth was nicely done, maintaining the rainforest theme. We had T-shirts and two kinds of swag: corgis and bananas. On the first day, only corgis were left; on the second, only bananas, it seems visitor preferences changed daily. Every team member had research chats with various candidates, a great opportunity for students to learn about Amazon teams from the inside.
At the exhibit hall entrance, Jump Trading had a robotic arm coffee machine using Artly, a brand started by a couple from Seattle.
In M7: GDM (many came from London), Microsoft, Meta; others included IBM, Databricks, Netflix. Didn't see NVIDIA.
From China: Tencent (with lots of 🐧plushies), ByteDance, Huawei. Alibaba didn’t attend.
After Hour Events (By Invitation)
List the events I was invited to, unfortunately, I had to miss most part of them due to limited bandwidth and scheduling conflicts.
Anyscale: Invited by co-founder Robert Nishihara. The event was in a bar. We discussed the growing importance of online data quality.
Y Combinator Lunch: Held at the “Five Sails”, very upscale. Many people were not ICML attendees but came to pitch projects, seek funding, or find co-founders. Had a long conversation with Pete Koomen (General Partner of YC). Initially, we were listening to a PhD student’s project on a LLM-native programming language. I later debated whether programming would even be needed in the future, or modules like that. Multiple drink options and refined desserts. Ran into the founder of Ollama, who invited me to their product’s 2nd anniversary.
Perplexity HH Bistro Night: Great vibes and well organized.
Turing x Anyscale: Co-hosted event.
MIT E14 Fund: Later ran into the organizer at the YC event.
机器之心 Banquet: Held at the Hyatt. More business-oriented, well-staffed, lots of attendees. There was a photo booth with a dedicated photographer. Even if you arrived late, waitstaff could bring out food.
Events I Knew About But Didn’t Register
Amazon AGI SF lab after hours.
Huawei and Tencent cruises, shows how actively Chinese companies are expanding abroad, and also the large talent pool of fresh grads from Chinese universities.
Cursor, OAI etc.
P.S. Vancouver felt hotter than Seattle.
