This year marks the 16th edition of this long-running NeurIPS workshop. The in-person OPT 2023 was a huge success with over 100 papers submitted (~90 accepted), 5 plenary speakers/5 contributed talks, 2 very well-attended poster sessions, over 400 people attending, and several lively discussions over the future directions of the field such as the use of statistics and high-dimensionality in the analysis of optimization algorithms and lower limits of nonsmooth, nonconvex losses. A highlight of our past successes includes bringing together young and established researchers. For example, Guy Kornowski (PhD student Weizmann) attended OPT 2022 with his paper and met Post-doc Tianyi Lin, the result was another paper presented at OPT 2023 as a contributed talk! This 2nd paper led to lively discussions with OPT ‘23 Plenary Speaker Dima Drusvyatskiy. We can only expect a third paper for OPT 2024. This is just one of many examples where the OPT Workshop has had an instrumental role in shaping the optimization and ML community.OPT 2024 will foster discussions, help strengthen and develop relationships among colleagues (especially among young researchers), and reach a larger audience than ever before; we expect a similar, if not a larger, turnout this year. Given this strong interest and prior success, we believe there is a need for this workshop to be part of NeurIPS, primarily as a vehicle for sharing cutting-edge optimization results relevant to machine learning and for deepening the interaction between the optimization and ML communities. This can be seen through our invited speakers, who come from classical optimization (Prof. Ben Grimmer and Prof. Aryan Mokhtari) to those who work directly in the field of ML (e.g. Prof. Misha Belkin and Research Scientist Karolina Dziugaite).