An ICLR submitter said on September 20 that more than 60,000 submissions were registered by the previous night’s abstract deadline. Citing ICLR’s blog, they compared that with 19,525 at the start of the previous cycle. If earlier trends hold, they estimate about 42,300 submissions could go through peer review, while saying the eligible reviewer pool remains roughly unchanged. The author says LLM tools have dramatically compressed the research process. In a reply, an enthusiastic research-agent user argues that the faster pace encourages incremental work and higher paper counts rather than deeper thinking about good problems. Their preference: the same number of papers, with greater depth and ambition.