The event
- Name
- The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25)
- Dates
- 25 February to 4 March 2025
- Venue
- Pennsylvania Convention Center, 1101 Arch Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Host
- Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
- Also on the programme
- Francesca Rossi (IBM Research, AAAI Presidential Address), Andrew Ng (DeepLearning.AI, AI Fund, LandingAI, Coursera), Susan Athey (Stanford Graduate School of Business), Stuart J. Russell (UC Berkeley, AI for Humanity Award lecture), David Chalmers (NYU)
- Programme
- aaai.org
Trip 25 February to 4 March 2025 · Written up 4 March 2025 · Last expanded 29 September 2026
I was back in Philadelphia in February 2025, five months after COLM, for a conference roughly ten times the size.
No room at all in the RL sessions
I turned up to AAAI-25 for a smorgasbord: knowledge based AI for science, reasoning, NLP, NLU, and Andrew Ng, which had me posting question marks before landing. It was easily my most productive conference, and the most competitive. The RL sessions went beyond standing room only to no room at all, alignment was slightly better, and neuro-symbolic synthesis was worth the elbows.
The session I still chew on was a workshop discussion of Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, the first US case on AI training regimes and copyright. Most of the room wanted to talk about the technical problem, detecting the impact of copyrighted material on a model, but a legal expert went elsewhere and hypothesised a laxer rule under this administration: unless stated explicitly at the time of scraping, the material can be used as training data. I do not know how robust that stays across administrations. The court, notably, treated the distinction between generative and non-generative AI as essential.
I also hosted a spur-of-the-moment meetup with a few entrepreneurial AI researchers at Love City Brewing (highly recommend it if you are ever in Philly), then ran the group photo through Sora’s image-to-video, which turned it into a cohesive twenty second clip. At least I did not switch ethnicities this time.
Writing up my notes afterwards, I kept coming back to advice from a fellow attendee named Anya (I never caught her last name) at an earlier seminar, which was that if you ask anyone an interesting question they will respond. Attending as a non-PhD is awkward, since the field has minted researchers and students and no slot in between, and AAAI-25 was the first conference where my questions came back with real feedback.
Photographs
Links
The Jackson Walker write-up of the Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence decision. To be added.
Open entry
This page is not finished, and is not meant to be. I add photographs, people and links as I dig them out, so it keeps growing after publication. Why the whole site works this way is on the colophon.
