Along with ICLR and ICML, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artificial intelligence research.

[1] The conference is currently a double-track meeting (single-track until 2015) that includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, followed by parallel-track workshops that up to 2013 were held at ski resorts.

NeurIPS was designed as a complementary open interdisciplinary meeting for researchers exploring biological and artificial Neural Networks.

[2] Research presented in the early NeurIPS meetings included a wide range of topics from efforts to solve purely engineering problems to the use of computer models as a tool for understanding biological nervous systems.

The first proceedings was published in book form by the American Institute of Physics in 1987, and was entitled Neural Information Processing Systems,[4] then the proceedings from the following conferences have been published by Morgan Kaufmann (1988–1993), MIT Press (1994–2004) and Curran Associates (2005–present) under the name Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

By 2018 a few commentators were criticizing the abbreviation as encouraging sexism due to its association with the word nipples, and as being a slur against Japanese.

[5] Along with machine learning and neuroscience, other fields represented at NeurIPS include cognitive science, psychology, computer vision, statistical linguistics, and information theory.