Events / San Diego

Data & Drinks with Abaka AI @ ACL 2026

A Monday-evening cocktail mixer near the ACL 2026 conference in San Diego, hosted by data-labeling company Abaka AI at a speakeasy venue.

Mon, Jul 6, 6:00 PMMarina, San Diego, CA

Why it matters

ACL draws NLP researchers and applied teams together, and sidebar events like this are where informal deals and hiring conversations around data and eval work actually happen.

The tokenmaxxing angle

Abaka AI's business is data curation and model evaluation, both upstream inputs that shape how efficiently a model can be fine-tuned or routed, tying directly to eval-driven model selection.

From the organizers

Hosted by Abaka AI, which describes itself as working with 1,000+ AI labs on data collection, annotation, and model evaluation across text, image, audio, video, and agent/RL data.