​About the AI Research Circle

​The AI Research Circle is a community gathering at The Commons where we explore and discuss AI research papers together. You don’t need to be a researcher—just bring curiosity and an interest in the field.

​Each session, we choose a paper, break it down into plain language, and dive into open conversation. The goal is to make cutting-edge ideas accessible, spark thoughtful debate, and connect across disciplines.

​Session Details

​Paper: DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

​This 2025 open-source model nearly matches OpenAI’s o1 in reasoning ability — but instead of massive supervised datasets, it was trained using pure RL and cold-start refinement. We’ll discuss what this training approach means for reasoning, scale, and the future of inference-time compute.

​Agenda

• ​Welcome & intros (10 min) — quick context and community check-in

• ​Paper on-ramp (20–25 min) — short overview + “explain it simply” exercise (to a 5, 15, and 50-year-old)

• ​Guided discussion (40–45 min) — prompts:

  1. ​How is this training different from RLHF?

  2. ​Is “thinking longer” real reasoning or just more compute?

  3. ​What changes when this level of reasoning is open-sourced?

• ​Wrap-up & next steps (10–15 min) — key takeaways + choose the next paper