2026 Talks
The World Is Not Enough: RL’s Environment Problem
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While researchers may still opine about access to compute, most are hitting a new bottleneck: access to high-quality environments in which to post-train agents. Expanding agent capabilities will depend on how we curate and utilize data, much of which exists only in the minds of human experts today. This panel will explore the challenge of building environments, including the need to improve infrastructure reliability, the obstacles posed by subjective domains, and the challenge of achieving high variety. We’ll also discuss future opportunities, such as environments for long-horizon reasoning and continual learning, and what it will take to evolve environment design from a bespoke craft into a more automated, scalable discipline that consistently drives generalization.
Founder & CEO
Thais Castello Branco
Taste
Thais Castello Branco is the founder and CEO of Taste, building the taste infrastructure layer for AI across subjective domains, starting with design. Taste works with frontier labs on post-training data and RL environments, and with app-layer companies to improve and evaluate generations at inference time. Taste recently closed a $16.1M seed round led by Amplify and CRV, and is hiring across engineering and ML research.
Co-founder & CEO
Vincent Weisser
Prime Intellect
Vincent Weisser is CEO and co-founder of Prime Intellect, an open frontier AI lab and infrastructure platform for self-improving agents, powering companies like Perplexity, Ramp, and Arcee. Prime Intellect has released the open-weight INTELLECT model series and foundational research in distributed training and scaling RL.
General Partner
Sarah Catanzaro
Amplify Partners
Sarah Catanzaro is a general partner at Amplify Partners, where she focuses on investing in and advising startups in AI, data management and distributed systems. Catanzaro previously worked on data strategy and led data science and AI teams for defense tech companies including Mattermark, Palantir and Cyveillance. She was also a program director at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit.
Co-founder & CEO
Nic Ouporov
Fleet
Nicolai Ouporov is the CEO of Fleet, which develops interactive simulation environments to teach AI models. He is a practicing artist, former ballet dancer, and robotist.
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