The biggest week in the AI ​​industry: The rise of Google, RL mania, and the party boat

This is an excerpt from Sources by Alex Heatha newsletter about artificial intelligence and the technology industry, is only distributed to The Verge subscribers once a week.

Reinforcement learning is the next frontier, Google is on the rise, and the party scene is completely out of control. Those were the lines from this year’s NeurIPS show in San Diego.

NeurIPS, or the “Neural Information Processing Systems Conference,” began in 1987 as a purely academic affair. It has since ballooned along with the hype around AI into a huge industry event as labs come to hire and investors come to find the next wave of AI startups.

I unfortunately wasn’t able to attend the NeurIPS conference 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 of responses below includes Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and founder of the Laude Institute; Thomas Wolfe, co-founder of Hugging Face; Ron OpenAI; Attendees are from Meta, Waymo, Google DeepMind, Amazon, and a few other places.

I asked everyone the same three questions: What was the most interesting topic at the conference? Which labs do you feel are on the rise or struggling? Who had the best party?

The consensus was clear. “RL RL RL RL is taking over the world,” Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of LMArena, told me. The industry is rallying 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’s clear from the Momentum Lab question is that Google is having a moment. “Google DeepMind feels good,” Hugging Face’s Lee Wolf told me.

The party circle was naturally relentless. Konwinski’s Laude Lounge emerged as one of this week’s hot spots — bringing in Jeff Dean, Yoshua Bengio, Ion Stoica, and about a dozen other top researchers. The model ship, an invitation-only cruise of 200 researchers, showed “an unprecedented commitment to the dance floor at a conference event,” one of the trip organizers, Nathan Lambert, told me. Ron was dry about the whole scene: “You can learn more from Twitter than you can from literally being there… My feeling on the ground was mostly that this is too much.”

Here’s what attendees said about NeurIPS this year:

What was the most interesting topic in the audience that you think more people will talk about in 2026?

Which labs do you feel are growing in momentum, and which ones feel shakiest?

What’s the best party you’ve attended or where you’ve had FOMO?

Yes, some people thought the keywords were parties. I guess academia lives in NeurIPS after all.