I referee for a lot of the top machine learning conferences and yes I am very optimistic about AI and its impact on humanity. The amount of exciting new papers in machine learning and AI was definitely on an exponential rise for a decade since about 2012 or so, and the total production has kept increasing even during the last couple of years when the submissions in some top annual conferences exceeded 10k. Not every paper results in a useable model but a higher fraction of papers come with code and pretrained weights over time. Many of these papers will never be read by many more than the reviewers and the group who wrote them and a couple friends, but it does not speak necessarily to the quality of the work itself or the potential impact it could have on every possible future if we found better ways to separate the useful information. As the exponential increase in total compute becomes more widely accessible there are exponentially more applications that are of broader interest and will have even bigger impact than nowadays. I don’t think that the model of reviewing 10s or 100s of thousands of papers in conferences, or playing the popularity contest on social media is going to be productive so we need better methods for advancing the useful ideas more quickly. (Case in point: the mamba state space model by Gu and Dao was rejected from a conference this winter, but it happened to be advertised enough at a keynote presentation by Chris Re with a packed audience at neurIPS23, so the model was picked up by a lot of people who used it and submitted applications that used it to the ICML conference already.) I also don’t think that some of the biggest companies have enough manpower, motivation and interest in going alone, though of course they can easily stay ahead of the game in specialized areas with their own resources.