If one's goal is to work at OpenAI, FAIR, or DeepMind, which would be a better use of time — obtaining this certificate or getting quality papers into NIPS / ICML?
Certainly the latter, getting published in top journals or conferences is several orders of magnitude more difficult.
Wow tough call. The certificate would represent a baseline of understanding which can be then further trained, a good publication history in NIPS/ICML Etc. would represent a solid contribution to the field. I would not be surprised if those were, to a first approximation, equivalent.