I mean he repeateadly gave some hints (even if just for the lulz and not seriously) that the audience is at least partially composed of people with little technical background or AI bros. An example is when he mentioned LSTMs and said "many of you may never seen before". Even if he didn't mean it, ironically it ended being spot on when the crypto question came.
As someone who is at NeurIPS right now with a main conference paper, I was shocked at how many NeurIPS attendees had no paper. At ACL conferences, almost every person attending has a paper (even if it's only at a workshop)
NeurIPS is "ruined" by the money and thus attracts huge amounts of people who are all trying to get rich. It's a bloody academic conference people!
A person with little or no technical background, that neither knows nor cares about AI (or other scientific/mathematical advancements) other than their potential to make the AI bro rich. There is a big overlap with crypto bros, and in fact many AI bros are just grifters who moved on after crypto tanked with the recent fed funds rate hikes.
