Larry Page & Sergey Brin had the PageRank paper (the algorithm behind Google Search) rejected. A reviewer called it “disjointed.” Geoffrey Hinton's Dropout was rejected for being “too simple.” I often feel the academic peer review is like a random process, especially when a paper is very innovative and changes the paradigm; it often looks "wrong" to reviewers in the old paradigm.
200 to 300 new AI papers show up on arXiv daily. NeurIPS 2025 received 21,575 submissions. Reviewer quality varies widely (many use AI for reviews). Academic peer review has become a random process.