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.