Frontier Paper Club — Palo Alto

Frontier Paper Club — Palo Alto Papers. People. Possibilities. How do we know an AI agent is actually getting better? What makes a research result hold up beyond its benchmark? And which ideas are ready to become systems people can depend on? Frontier Paper Club is a monthly gathering in Palo Alto for researchers, engineers, and founders exploring the next generation of AI. Sponsored by Startup Island Taiwan and Blobfish.ai, we bring together people developing new methods, building agent systems, and testing what works in practice. Each session centers on 2–3 papers, benchmarks, or technical implementations selected around a shared research question. Topics span AI agents, reinforcement learning, post-training, reasoning, memory, evaluation, and simulation environments. Presentations are brief and technically grounded, leaving plenty of time to examine the work together: the assumptions behind a method, the strength of its evidence, the details needed to reproduce it, and the failures that suggest where research should go next.

🕒 Evening format 5:30pm Arrivals & Introductions Meet fellow researchers and builders. Share what you’re working on and the questions you’re hoping to explore. 6:00pm Research Presentations & Benchmark Discussion Presenters walk through the problem, approach, key results, and limitations. Each talk is followed by audience questions and technical discussion. 7:30pm Open Conversation & Networking Continue the discussion, exchange implementation notes, and meet potential collaborators. The detailed schedule will be announced with the speaker lineup.

📝 Want to present your work? Have research or an implementation you’d like to discuss with Bay Area’s AI community? We’re accepting submissions covering: AI agents, reasoning, planning, and memory Reinforcement learning and post-training Benchmarks, evaluation methods, and agent reliability Simulation environments and synthetic training data Reproductions, negative results, and practical lessons from deployment Share a link to your paper, benchmark, project, or slides, along with what you’d like to present. Submissions will be considered for upcoming sessions. Submit your work here → Questions? Contact johnny@blobfish.ai.

🤝 Sponsored by Startup Island TAIWAN - Silicon Valley Hub Startup Island TAIWAN is a national initiative supporting Taiwanese startups expanding globally. Located in Palo Alto, the Silicon Valley Hub connects founders with investors, corporate partners, and innovation ecosystems while serving as a bridge between Taiwan and Silicon Valley. The Hub regularly hosts events, delegation visits, founder programs, and ecosystem gatherings that strengthen collaboration between Taiwan's technology ecosystem and the global innovation community. Blobfish.ai Blobfish.ai builds training gyms for AI agents—simulated enterprise environments where models practice workflows across tools such as CRMs, ERPs, and spreadsheets. Its environments combine realistic data, executable tools, adjustable task difficulty, and deterministic checks of task outcomes. As models improve, Blobfish generates new challenges to support continued learning, with a focus on the complex, multi-step work agents need to perform in practice.