NeurIPS 2025: Foundations, Agents, and the Future of Intelligence

The collected sources provide a comprehensive summary of the NeurIPS 2025 conference in San Diego and Mexico City, highlighting both cutting-edge technical achievements and critical debates about the direction of AI research. Award-winning papers spanned core fields, introducing breakthroughs such as improving LLM efficiency with Gated Attention for Large Language Models, demonstrating performance gains by scaling RL networks to 1000 layers, and resolving a 30-year-old open problem in theory by quantifying the quadratic gap in transductive online learning. Societal concerns were prominent, with research defining the Artificial Hivemind risk—the dangerous homogenization of LLM outputs—while invited speakers issued sharp warnings about "jagged intelligence" and the immediate threat posed by Artificial Good-Enough Intelligence (AGEI). Logistically, the main conference review process faced severe criticism for inconsistent rejection of high-scoring papers due to venue capacity constraints, spurring discussions on how to scale academic recognition for top-tier science. Ultimately, the events showcased a field attempting to balance rapid engineering progress with rigorous attention to fundamental principles and mandated social responsibility.