{"id":16271,"date":"2025-12-10T12:55:01","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T12:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demo4.dedicatedhost247.com\/newstime\/the-ai-industrys-biggest-week-googles-rise-rl-mania-and-a-party-boat\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T12:55:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T12:55:01","slug":"the-ai-industrys-biggest-week-googles-rise-rl-mania-and-a-party-boat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demo4.dedicatedhost247.com\/newstime\/the-ai-industrys-biggest-week-googles-rise-rl-mania-and-a-party-boat\/","title":{"rendered":"The AI industry\u2019s biggest week: Google\u2019s rise, RL mania, and a party boat"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath<\/a>, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Reinforcement learning (RL) is the next frontier, Google is surging, and the party scene has gotten completely out of hand. Those were the through lines from this year\u2019s NeurIPS in San Diego.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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NeurIPS, or the \u201cConference on Neural Information Processing Systems,\u201d started in 1987 as a purely academic affair. It has since ballooned alongside the hype around AI into a massive industry event where labs come to recruit and investors come to find the next wave of AI startups.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I was regretfully unable to attend NeurIPS this year, but I still wanted to know what people were talking about on the ground in San Diego over the past week. So I asked engineers, researchers, and founders for their takeaways. The list below of responses includes Andy Konwinski, cofounder of Databricks and founder of the Laude Institute; Thomas Wolf, cofounder of Hugging Face; OpenAI\u2019s Roon; and attendees from Meta, Waymo, Google DeepMind, Amazon, and a handful of other places.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I asked everyone the same three questions: What\u2019s the buzziest topic from the conference? Which labs feel like they\u2019re surging or struggling? Who had the best party?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The consensus was clear. \u201cRL RL RL RL is taking over the world,\u201d Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of LMArena, told me. The industry is coalescing around the idea that tuning models for specific use cases, rather than scaling the data used for pre-training, will drive the next wave of AI progress. What\u2019s clear from the lab momentum question is that Google is having a moment. \u201cGoogle DeepMind is feeling good,\u201d Hugging Face\u2019s Wolf told me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The party circuit was naturally relentless. Konwinski\u2019s Laude Lounge emerged as one of the week\u2019s hotspots \u2014 Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Ion Stoica, and about a dozen other top researchers came through. Model Ship, an invite-only cruise with 200 researchers, featured \u201ca commitment to the dance floor that is unprecedented at a conference event,\u201d one of the organizers of the cruise, Nathan Lambert, told me. Roon was dry about the whole scene: \u201cyou can learn more from twitter than from literally being there … mostly my on-the-ground feeling was \u2018this is too much.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Here\u2019s what attendees had to say about NeurIPS this year:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What was the buzziest topic among attendees that you think more people will be talking about in 2026?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Which labs feel like they\u2019re surging in momentum, and which ones feel more shaky?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What was the best party you attended or had FOMO over?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yes, some people thought keynotes were parties. I guess academia lives on at NeurIPS after all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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