“Hiring is decreasing due to artificial intelligence (AI), and there are a lot of companies looking to hire.”

“There are a lot of companies wanting to hire people because hiring is decreasing due to artificial intelligence (AI).”

The website of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026, which opened on the 6th at COEX in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. In the “recruitment” space where companies post job postings, flyers from companies recruiting human resources were lined up.

Not only AI companies such as Neoclouds and Neoclouds, but also research institutes such as Epoch AI are paying attention to various announcements. There was also an announcement that Chinese university research institutes will be hiring human resources. AI talent who gathered in Seoul to participate in the conference took photos of the attention-grabbing notifications.

According to ICML2026 organizers on the 11th, the number of field participants registered for the first conference held in South Korea was 20,456. This is the largest ICML conference held in the past 10 years, and the first time official ICML tickets have sold out.

ICML is one of the world’s three major AI conferences, and is an event attended by many researchers related to machine learning, such as large-scale language models (LLM) and AI agents. Researchers from major universities, research institutes, and companies submitted papers to the conference and gave poster presentations of the accepted papers.

As AI talent from all over the world gathered together, companies also participated in the conference by setting up sponsor booths, promoting their research results and direction, and looking for talent. Due to the war for talent, the venue was not only lined with booths from major technology companies, but also various unofficial events held by companies from the evening onwards.

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One area in the booth space that caused many visitors to stop was the open AI booth. At the OpenAI booth, Norm Brown, Vice President of OpenAI Research, who was visiting South Korea, held a session with other researchers on the theme of “reinforcement learning.” In particular, OpenAI placed emphasis on networking with other researchers and recruitment, and held various events in and outside the venue in addition to the booth.

During the conference, OpenAI rented the Devils Door restaurant at COEX and held a networking event in collaboration with AI semiconductor company Cerebras, and OpenAI’s safety organization hosted a “mixer,” which refers to a networking event, touted as “participating teams that are actively hiring.”

In addition to OpenAI, the sponsor booth space featured booths from major technology companies such as Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and IBM. An AI graduate student I met at the venue said, “It seems like almost every major technology company except Antropics has a booth.” “I have never seen so many booths at a conference event.”

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France’s Mistral AI, which is considered the pride of European AI, actively advertised its “Recruitment of Founding Members in Korea” at its booth and announced that it had begun hiring in Korea. Mistral AI does not yet have a Korean office, but has recently partnered with NAVER Cloud to expand its business there.

Chinese companies competing with the US for supremacy in AI also showed off their presence.

Alibaba, famous for its AI model “Qwen,” actively promoted its Q1 model at its booth and held a separate “Q1 Meetup” event on the 9th, focusing on expanding its developer ecosystem. ByteDance and Kuaishou, two famous Chinese video generation AI companies, also participated in this event.

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An area where networking can be just as active as official booth events are informal networking events sponsored by companies. Companies held various meetup events during the evening hours of the conference for recruiting and networking opportunities.

On the 9th, AMI Lab, founded by New York University professor Jean LeCun, one of the most prominent AI scholars, held a networking event in partnership with venture capital (VC) firm SBVA. AMI Labs’ leading researchers, including CEO Alexander LeBron and Sining City’s Chief Scientific Officer (CSO), were in attendance to explain AMI Labs’ direction and interact with attendees.

LG AI Research Institute, which presented 14 papers at this conference, held “LG AI Day” inviting more than 100 master’s and doctoral students who will be participating in ICML 2026.

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Meanwhile, among Korean companies, Naver participated as a booth along with LG AI Research Institute, and Nota, Vesle AI, Tinaps, Trillion Labs, Friendly AI, and HyperExcel also exhibited booths and presented papers at this conference.

In the case of Naver, in addition to introducing research results such as world model technology, we also set up a network space the same size as the booth space, with an emphasis on communication with researchers from around the world who visited the booth.