Would a 2000-2021 ML Paper Get Accepted Today? The Rising Bar in ML Research

A recurring question on r/MachineLearning asks whether the papers that defined modern deep learning — the ones written between 2000 and 2021 — would survive peer review if they were submitted fresh today. It is not a nostalgia exercise. The answer tells you how fast the floor has risen, and that floor is the same one your production AI tools are now measured against. We went back through what acceptance at NeurIPS and ICML actually required at three points in time, and the gap is wider than the...