In 2016, the event had 5,000 registered participants. Last year, the number was 8,000. This year, the first batch of 2,000 tickets sold out in 12 minutes. The annual conference on Neural Information Processing System -- until earlier this month it bore the acronym NIPS, which some attendees protested for its potentially offensive connotations -- was first proposed in 1986 at the Snowbird Meeting on Neural Networks for Computing, an event organized by the California Institute of Technology and Bell Laboratories. Originally conceived as a meeting for researchers exploring biological and artificial neural networks, it's come to be dominated by papers on artificial intelligence (AI), statistics, and machine learning.