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
To be announced
What you get
GPU compute credits
API credits
1:1 mentorship from partner labs
Benchmarks, datasets and starter repos
Prizes
Cash prizes for the top teams
Compute and API credits
Thematic prizes from track partners
Sponsors
- OpenAI: The AI research company behind ChatGPT and Codex, building models and tools for developers and researchers.
- 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.
- 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.