Gradient Descent into Madness: NeurIPS 2025 Weekend Paper Read-a-thon with Poseidon Research, Arb Research and the NYC Impact Hub

​What if I told you we're going to read every NeurIPS 2025 paper the weekend before NeurIPS? Join fellow AI researchers for the most ambitious (and slightly unhinged) paper-reading challenge before the conference. Food and drinks (many with caffeine) provided. Bring yourself and any left over Thanksgiving dishes - we'll need the calories.

UPDATE:

• ​We’re here to have fun and meet other AI enthusiasts! Please bring along a laptop.

• ​This event has a physical location at the NYC Impact Hub in NYC, but can also be attended remotely. If you are remote, you can join us here: https://meet.google.com/eyg-rxvd-wmu

• ​We’re running the event from:

  • ​9am EST to 7pm EST Friday 28th

  • ​9am EST to 7pm EST Saturday 29th

  • ​9am EST to 7pm EST Sunday 30th

• ​But you can drop by as your schedule dictates.

• ​You'll be randomly assigned a NeurIPS paper that has not already been read. Here is a video explaining roughly what we'll be doing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JIFmwQHZOWObJSQ9_Hr03SN9OYojCBRG/view?usp=drive_link (Note, in the video I say that someone from Thinking Machines gave us the Memoscope tool. Turns out this is not true. We can however thank Robert Ghilduta for it! We decided to upload our first take with gaffs in the spirit of a scrappy hackathon ...)

• ​If you don’t like the look of the paper assigned to you, you can skip it to load another, but we encourage you to read widely to learn something new!

• ​You’ll have 15 minutes to skim the paper and make notes. This is to ensure we get through as many papers as possible. Feel free to go faster!

• ​All notes will be added to a database for a final analysis.

• ​You are welcome to read with the help of an LLM and make notes.

• ​You can break whenever you like. We’ll also have official breaks throughout the day. For those of you in NYC, there will be food and drinks on site. Feel free to bring your own Thanksgiving leftovers!

• ​Some people will be live-streaming their process from Twitch. There is no obligation to be involved in this.

• ​If you are interested, we can also interview you about your experience for a short documentary to be edited after NeurIPS. There is also no obligation to be involved in this either.

• ​Below are links for our Read-a-thon tool.

• ​To sign in for the in person event click here -> https://neurips.poseidonresearch.com/sign-up?token=4HQksHQAgHl14j46eeCUKiPzb1RzhE5CJhtkBco7

• ​To sign in for the virtual event click here -> https://neurips.poseidonresearch.com/sign-up?token=JgmF4WftEsrwvFIzwdC6UUE8Z9L7dy6ic4vHRGU3

​Looking forward to seeing you all!