We survived a hot AI summer. I’m buckling up for fall.

After my summer of conferences, cross-country reporting, geopolitics and industry gossip, it feels like the AI landscape may be overheated. Fall could be a cooldown — or another storm.

It’s been a hot AI summer, amirite?

A feverish heat wave finally broke in the New York metro area where I live, and I’m breathing a cool sign of relief in the suddenly-brisk morning air. It feels like I barely had a chance to slow down during the past few sizzling months — in fact, it’s mostly been a whirlwind of conferences, cross-country reporting, geopolitics and industry gossip.

June: Eric Schmidt takes DC (while I get Covid); Mark Zuckerberg taps Alexandr Wang

I kicked off June by heading down to DC for the AI Expo for National Competitiveness, hosted by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), which was attended by thousands of government, academic and private sector professionals. When I tested positive for Covid the day after returning from Washington, DC with a fever and cold symptoms, I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, here’s how I described the crowded on-the-ground scene in Fortune:

“Drones buzz overhead, piercing the human hum in the crowded Walter E. Washington Convention Center. On the ground, tech executives, uniformed Army officers, policy wonks, and politicians compete for attention as swarms of people move throughout the vast space. There are pitches about “next generation of warfighters,” and panels about winning the “AI innovation race.” There are job seekers and dignitaries. And at the center of it all, there is Eric Schmidt.”

Once I recovered (and apologized to anyone I infected at a gala event hosted by Tammy Haddad’s Washington AI Network, it only took a few days for next Hot AI Summer event to pop up. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg got everyone talking by announcing an ambitious new “superintelligence” AI research lab headed by Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang — a bold bid for relevance in its fierce AI battle with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. It’s funny that a couple of days later I wrote a newsletter story about how Mark Zuckerberg has an AI talent problem—but money alone is unlikely to solve it. Boy, was I wrong, lol!

Not surprisingly, my Fortune editors wanted a deep-dive story on Alexandr Wang, pronto. So my colleague Allie Garfinkle and I hit the phones and Signal chat and spent a busy weekend coming up with Inside the rise of Alexandr Wang and Meta’s $14 billion bet that the MIT dropout will help bring AI supremacy. That would be the end of that, right? Fat chance, as you’ll see below.

July: International Conference for Machine Learning in Vancouver; “Winning the AI Race” in DC with Trump and the All-In bros; and more Meta and Alexandr Wang! More!

I had told my Fortune editors — Alexei Oreskovic and Jeremy Kahn — that I wanted to go to one of the top AI research conferences this year. I chose ICML (International Conference for Machine Learning) in Vancouver in mid-July, and I chose well.

I spent a week hanging with thousands of PhD-level AI researchers from elite universities, Big Tech labs, and AI startups. As I wrote in Fortune’s Eye on AI newsletter, it was humbling to be surrounded by professors, postdocs, and industry researchers who casually drop references to mathematical proofs and thermodynamics metaphors into everyday conversation. There were thousands of posters, papers, and presentations—far too many to meaningfully absorb, even if I fed them all into ChatGPT. My brain felt like it was running at max capacity as I try to make sense of talks titled “Controlling Underestimation Bias in Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Safe Exploration” and “Discrete Flow Matching for Graph Generation.”

But there was something electric about being in the room where the future of AI is being debated, defined, and maybe even redirected. I’m a big believer in getting out of my comfort zone—and into a beginner’s mindset—especially in a space where today’s theories might become tomorrow’s technologies.

Just a week after I returned from Vancouver, I was on an Amtrak train back down to Washington, DC to “Winning the AI Race”—an event hosted by the All-In podcast and the Hill & Valley coalition—where Silicon Valley’s elite descended on Washington’s stately Andrew Mellon Auditorium to celebrate President Trump’s new AI Action Plan, which he signed onstage after a surreal afternoon that fused podcast spectacle with public policy. The only non–Silicon Valley touch seemed to be the sea of suits that replaced the typical tech uniform of hoodies and sneakers (though Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang refused to budge from his usual leather jacket and black jeans).

Trump’s speech before scrawling his signature went on so long that I missed my Amtrak train back to New Jersey. While I waited for the next one, I had plenty of time to reflect on the day—which, without question, was a victory lap for the so-called AI “accelerationists,” now led in Washington by David Sacks, Trump’s appointed AI and crypto czar and co-host of the All-In podcast.

In between and during my travels in the peak of Hot AI Summer, I got to dig further into Meta’s move to reorganize its AI organization into Meta Superintelligence Labs, with Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer. In fact, Fortune wanted it as the cover of the August/September print edition! As you can see by the cover image, Wang hardly looks 28 — yet he is now leading Meta’s AI dream team, packed with AI industry superstars paid like high-priced athletes.

August: UC Berkeley for an agentic AI summit; Las Vegas for AI and cybersecurity, hacking and geeky vibes; and no rest for the weary thanks to OpenAI’s GPT-5 and open source model

If I had dreams of heading to Iceland to cool off, it was not to be. However, I did get a reprieve from the summer heat in the Bay area, where I took a quick trip to attend a day-long Agentic AI Summit at UC Berkeley. Only in the Bay, by the way, does spending a Saturday geeking out about AI agents—alongside 2,000 students, researchers, and tech insiders —feel like a totally normal weekend plan. As I picked up my badge and watched the line snake through the student union lobby, it felt less like an academic conference and more like Silicon Valley’s version of a buzzy New York brunch spot.

I flew to Las Vegas a couple of days later, where I looked forward to immersing myself in all things AI and cybersecurity — at the annual Black Hat conference and the DEF CON hacker gathering. But, stuck in the chilly A/C thanks to the hot blow dryer weather of 107-degree Vegas, I also got word that OpenAI’s long-awaited open-source model was to be released imminently, and then a couple of days later, GPT-5.

I ended up spending most of my Vegas time huddled in my hotel room covering OpenAI’s announcements. But I still managed to cover what I honestly found more fascinating: Black Hat and DEF CON, two of the year’s biggest security and “ethical” hacking conferences, where cutting-edge security research is presented; hackers race to expose flaws in everything from AI chatbots to power grids; and governments, corporations, and hobbyists swap notes and learn the latest threat-fighting techniques.

I was there because AI now occupies a strange place in the security world—it is both a vulnerable target, often under threat from malicious AI; an armed defender using that same technology to protect systems and networks from bad actors; and an offensive player, deployed to probe weaknesses or carry out attacks (illegally in criminal hands). Sound confusing? It is—and that contradiction was on full display at the very corporate Black Hat, as well as DEF CON, often referred to as “hacker summer camp.”

A shifting AI autumn mood?

I returned from Vegas — again, unsurprisingly — with a bad cold. But I also came back with the sense that the AI mood was shifting slightly. There’s Sam Altman’s talk of an AI “bubble”; studies showing enterprise AI adoption is far harder than expected; concerns about China’s AI models speeding ahead; a tech stock slide.

Either way, I’m happy to chill out a bit as we slide into Labor Day — I have a couple of weeks at home before heading to Park City, Utah to participate in Fortune’s annual Brainstorm Tech conference (join me by registering here!).

Then, of course, it will be on to whatever cool Fall news comes down the AI pike.

How was your Hot AI Summer? ☀️