"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's NeurIPS in San Diego. NeurIPS, or the "Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems," 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."
"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's Roon; and attendees from Meta, Waymo, Google DeepMind, Amazon, and a handful of other places."
NeurIPS has transitioned from a small academic conference into a large industry event where labs recruit and investors seek AI startups. Reinforcement learning (RL) emerged as a dominant theme, with attendees noting renewed focus and momentum in RL research. Google displayed notable surge in activity and influence across presentations and demos. The conference combined heavy technical exchange with extensive networking and social events that many described as increasingly large and out of hand. Responses came from engineers, researchers, and founders from organizations including Databricks, Hugging Face, OpenAI, Meta, Waymo, Google DeepMind, and Amazon.
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