A few I noted: Neural nets don't emulate the brain. NIPS is not an obscure conference, it's been the top ML conference for decades (sure, it's an obscure conference to laymen, but so is pretty much every science publication conference).

Agreed with this guy. Back when I started grad school (2012), NIPS was already so big they moved it to Vegas, but the casino venue didn't fly so well, so it moved to Montreal. NIPS was obscure maybe in the early 2000s, but definitely NOT since the last 5 6 years.