The AI industry’s biggest week: Google’s rise, RL mania, and a party boat
TL;DR
NeurIPS 2024 highlights include reinforcement learning as the next frontier, Google's strong presence, and an extravagant party scene, reflecting the conference's evolution from academic to major industry event.
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This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
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 …