Below is a segment from “Sources” by Alex Heath, a newsletter focusing on AI and the tech industry, shared exclusively with The Verge readers on a weekly basis.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is poised to be the next significant advancement, Google is making impressive strides, and the social events have become extravagantly over-the-top. These were the dominant themes at this year’s NeurIPS conference in San Diego.

Established in 1987 as an academic gathering, NeurIPS, or the “Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems,” has evolved into a major industry spectacle. It now serves as a hub where labs scout talent and investors hunt for burgeoning AI startups, propelled by the burgeoning fascination with artificial intelligence.

Although I couldn’t make it to NeurIPS this year, I was eager to capture the buzz from the event in San Diego. To do so, I reached out to engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs for their insights. Contributors included Andy Konwinski, cofounder of Databricks and founder of the Laude Institute; Thomas Wolf, cofounder of Hugging Face; OpenAI’s Roon; and representatives from Meta, Waymo, Google DeepMind, Amazon, among others.

I posed three identical questions to each participant: What was the hottest topic at the conference? Which labs are on the rise or facing challenges? And, who hosted the most memorable party?

The feedback was unanimous. Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of LMArena, emphasized, “RL is taking over the world.” The industry is increasingly focused on refining models for specific applications, rather than merely expanding the data used for initial training, as the path to the next AI breakthrough. As for lab performance, Google appears to be in the spotlight. “Google DeepMind is feeling good,” remarked Hugging Face’s Wolf.

The party circuit was naturally relentless. Konwinski’s Laude Lounge emerged as one of the week’s hotspots — 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 “a commitment to the dance floor that is unprecedented at a conference event,” one of the organizers of the cruise, Nathan Lambert, told me. Roon was dry about the whole scene: “you can learn more from twitter than from literally being there … mostly my on-the-ground feeling was ‘this is too much.’”

Here’s what attendees had to say about NeurIPS this year:

What was the buzziest topic among attendees that you think more people will be talking about in 2026?

Which labs feel like they’re surging in momentum, and which ones feel more shaky?

What was the best party you attended or had FOMO over?

Yes, some people thought keynotes were parties. I guess academia lives on at NeurIPS after all.