Bay Area Frontier Research Club | Ascension by AGI House SF (dinner + discussion)
The Bay Area Frontier Research Club is a curated forum for rigorous discussion on how AI is reshaping the scientific research process. We convene experimental researchers, computational scientists, and research engineers across domains to examine concrete work—papers, methods, and workflows—covering literature synthesis, hypothesis generation, experimental design, simulation, analysis, and reproducibility.
For each session, we curate 2–3 papers selected for rigor and discussion value. Presentations are intentionally brief so the majority of time is reserved for questions and critique: assumptions, evaluation methodology, failure modes, and what would constitute convincing evidence. Papers and supporting materials are shared in advance to ensure a high-baseline conversation.
Agenda
5:30pm: Doors open
5:30pm – 6:30pm: Networking + light dinner
6:30pm – 8:00pm: Research presentations + discussion
8:00pm – 8:30pm: Networking
Presenters & topics
Talk #1: Athanor — Hitting the Cost Frontier on ARC-AGI-2
Presented by Dastin (Yuanjun) Huang, AI Researcher at Sentient Labs and creator of Athanor — a multi-agent ARC-AGI-2 solver currently leading the cost frontier at 95.7% public eval at $3.12/task. Athanor's architecture is built on three mechanisms: code execution as a verification tool (compressing hypothesis checking into fewer tokens than chain-of-thought), an independent artifact-only reviewer that can reject solutions even when they pass training 100%, and Inter-Agent Artifact Exchange (IAAE) for structured state handover between solver and reviewer contexts. Notably, Athanor solves 8 of 9 public-eval tasks that no CoT-only model has ever solved in the HuggingFace attempts corpus — demonstrating discoveries that repeated chain-of-thought attempts cannot reach. Released with 119 full inference traces for audit. Dastin will walk through the architectural choices behind Athanor and what they reveal about the cost-versus-capability frontier in agentic reasoning.
Talk #2: To be announced
Talk #3: To be announced
Want to present your work?
If you have a research paper you’d like to discuss at one of our next sessions, please submit it for consideration.
Submit your paper here.
Who should attend
Experimental researchers
Computational scientists across domains (bio/chem/materials/climate/neuro/physics)
Research engineers + lab automation people
Folks building tools for literature review, experiment planning, robotics, simulation, or scientific data
No ML background required. If you’ve ever wished research moved faster, you belong here.
Capacity is limited.
We will take photos and short video clips for event recap and promotion. By attending, you consent to being photographed and recorded, and to the use of those images and clips by the organizers on social media and other event marketing channels.
Hosted by
Frontier Syndicate is a private venture circle connecting frontier tech researchers, builders, and investors through curated convenings and early-stage capital. Across the Bay Area, we host a recurring series of research forums, builder nights, and intimate investor dinners — and back exceptional companies emerging from the labs, communities, and technical networks we convene.
Hexo Labs is building an AI-native platform for scientific discovery. Through Emily, its AI scientist system, Hexo helps researchers generate hypotheses, design experiments, and accelerate research workflows across ambitious scientific domains, with the goal of helping more breakthrough ideas move toward real-world impact.
Cerebral Valley is the community and event platform at the center of San Francisco's AI ecosystem — hosting tech and AI events, meetups, hackathons, and conferences where ML engineers, AI researchers, and startup founders connect and build the future of technology.
Ascension by AGI House SF is a community of AI founders and researchers accelerating humanity's transition to AGI, hosting merit-based gatherings, hackathons, and technical events that draw leading AI minds from around the world.