VANCOUVER — Deep in the cavernous convention centre here, on math-filled posters or in spirited conversations, could be a breakthrough for artificial intelligence in the making.

More than 16,000 computer scientists and fellow travellers gathered in British Columbia over the past week for what has become AI's biggest annual event: NeurIPS, or the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

Long toiling in obscurity, AI's brightest minds have convened at the event since 1987, for years in Denver, then in Vancouver and other cities. More recently these researchers have emerged as industry sensations helping drive the future of technology and the global economy.

Rock stars of the field told their budding compatriots, packed into an exhibition hall last week, how they saw the future of AI. "The more it reasons, the more unpredictable it becomes," said Ilya Sutskever, until recently OpenAI's chief scientist.

"The new ladder to climb," said Stanford's Fei-Fei Li, "is the 3D ladder, which I call spatial intelligence." She said relying on 2D data from the internet was like building AI for a "flat earth."

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