AI Research Hackathon
SF AI Research Hackathon
November 14-15, 2026 · San Francisco
Over 48 hours, teams will push AI to do research on its own: systems that improve themselves, run their own experiments, and work together as swarms of research agents!
You'll be building with real tools, models and benchmarks from the partners of this hackathon, then pitching live in front of judges, VCs, and leading researchers.
November 14-15, 2026
Day 1 (9am-late): Kickoff, hacking, mentorship
Day 2 (until 7PM): Final builds, demos, judging, awards
Teams of 3-5
Tracks
Each team picks one track:
Build Your Own Autoresearch Framework
Recursive Self-Improvement by Pacific
AI Scientist Swarms
World Models by Applied Reality
Sponsor challenges, open to every track:
Exa: research agents that search: build a research agent, AI scientist or self-improving system that uses Exa to find what it doesn’t already know
past.dev: build a shared memory layer for a multi-agent setup or swarm using past.dev, and prove better accuracy, latency gains and cost reduction than the common existing approaches
Modal: best use of Modal
What you get
$600+ in credits per hacker: $250 in Modal credits, $200 in Devin credits (1 month of the Max plan), $100 in Tinker credits and $50 in Exa credits, plus OpenAI API credits
1:1 mentorship from partner labs
Benchmarks, datasets and starter resources for each track
Prizes: over $100K in credits and prizes
Cash prizes for the top teams, plus prizes from OpenAI for the top 3
Tinker: $5K in Tinker credits for 1st place
Pacific: $5K in compute hours ($3K / $1.5K / $500)
Exa: $5K, $3K and $1K in Exa credits, plus Exa hoodies, Exa-branded TRMNLs and Exa goats..and more
Modal: $5K in credits
past.dev: a 3D printer for each winning team member + $1K in past.dev credits
Boardy: one year of Boardy Pro
$500 for the best photo posted on X during the event
Sponsors
- OpenAI: The AI research company behind ChatGPT and Codex, building models and tools for developers and researchers.
- Tinker by Thinking Machines: An API for fine-tuning open-weight language models. You write the training loop, Tinker handles the distributed training.
- Modal: A serverless cloud platform for running AI models, experiments, and data workloads at scale.
- past.dev: A long-term memory API for AI agents, helping them retain context, track changing facts, and share knowledge across teams.
- Exa: A search engine built for AI, giving agents and developers fast, high-quality web search and content retrieval through an API.
- Applied Reality: An applied AI lab building multimodal world models that understand, simulate, and generate interactive environments.
- Cognition: The company behind Devin, an AI software engineer that helps developers build, test, and debug code.
- Pacific (YC S26): Mass-producing and financing modular data centers that deploy in days on stalled infrastructure sites.
- Voyager Ventures: A venture capital firm investing in frontier energy, industrial and physical AI companies.
- Boardy: An AI networking platform connecting people with relevant founders, investors, and collaborators.
In-Person Attendance: all team members must be physically present at the venue for the duration of the hackathon. Remote participation is not permitted.
Food and drinks provided throughout the weekend
Brought to you by Iterate × Boardy.