Even if you’re a current PhD student, it’s hard to keep up with the latest AI research. That’s why we started YC Paper Club, a small group of researchers, engineers, and founders who will meet every two weeks this summer to present and discuss new papers together.
This was from our very first discussion group on May 20th, 2026, at the YC office in Mountain View, CA.
Thanks to the following presenters:
0:12 – Intro from YC Visiting Partner Francois Chaubard
3:49 – Tanishq Kumar — Speculative Speculative Decoding (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03251)
18:33 – Guangyao (Stannis) Zhou — Diffusion-MPC (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05364)
30:26 – Isaac Ward — LeWorldModeling (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19312)
43:54 – Akshay Vegesna — Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02113)
51:24 – Konwoo Kim — Pretraining Under Infinite Compute (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14786)
