> rather the tasks of detecting errors have become increasingly difficult because of the associated effects of GPT.
Did the increase to submissions to NeurIPS from 2020 to 2025 happen because ChatGPT came out in November of 2022? Or was AI getting hotter and hotter during this period, thereby naturally increasing submissions to ... an AI conference?
I guess the way one would verify that this is more general trend in academia would be to run this on accepted papers to a non-AI conference?
I was an area chair on the NeurIPS program committee in 1997. I just looked and it seems that we had 1280 submissions. At that time, we were ultimately capped by the book size that MIT Press was willing to put out - 150 8-page articles. Back in 1997 we were all pretty sure we were on to something big.
I'm sure people made mistakes on their bibliographies at that time as well!
And did we all really dig up and read Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953)?
Edited to add: Someone made a chart! Here: https://papercopilot.com/statistics/neurips-statistics/
You can see the big bump after the book-length restriction was lifted, and the exponential rise starting ~2016.