This is an excerpt from Alex Heath’s Sources, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry that is syndicated to The Verge subscribers only once a week.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the next frontier, Google is on the rise, and the party scene is completely out of control. Those were the final lines of this year’s Neurips in San Diego.
NeurIPS, or “Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems”, began in 1987 as a purely academic affair. It has since grown into a huge industry event, fueled by all the hype around AI, where labs come to recruit and investors come to find the next wave of AI startups.
I’m sorry to be unable to attend NeurIPS this year, but I still wanted to know what people were talking about on the field in San Diego last week. So I asked engineers, researchers, and founders for their suggestions. The list of responses below includes Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and founder of the Loud Institute; Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face; OpenAI’s Roon; And attendees from Meta, Waymo, Google DeepMind, Amazon, and a few other places.
I asked everyone the same three questions: What is the hottest topic of the conference? Which labs feel like they are making headway or struggling? Who had the best party?
The consensus was clear. “RL RL RL RL is taking over the world,” LMArena CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos 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 is clear from the Lab speed question is that Google is buying some time. “Google DeepMind is feeling good,” Hugging Face’s Wolf told me.
The party circuit was naturally relentless. Konwinski’s Loud Lounge emerged as one of the hotspots of the week – Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Ion Stoica and about a dozen other top researchers came. The model ship, an invite-only cruise with 200 researchers, displayed a “commitment to the dance floor that is unprecedented in a conference program,” Nathan Lambert, one of the cruise organizers, told me. Roon was dry about the whole scene: “You can learn more from Twitter than being there virtually… Mostly my ground feeling was that ‘This is too much.'”
What this year’s attendees had to say about Neurips:
What was the hottest topic among attendees that you think more people will be talking about in 2026?
Which labs feel like they are gaining momentum, and which labs feel more unstable?
What was the best party you attended or had FOMO in?
Yes, some people thought the main speakers were the parties. I think academia finally comes alive in NeurIPS.
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