5 Papers That Show Where AI Research Is Heading Right Now

It's hard to keep up with the latest AI research. That's why we started YC Paper Club — a small group of researchers, engineers, and founders who meet every two weeks at our Mountain View office to present and discuss new papers together. In this session, we cover whether scaling laws hold for protein biology, AlphaZero-style self-play for language models, streaming RAG for real-time voice agents, formal verification with Lean, and why one founder thinks programming with agents is exactly like playing a real-time strategy game. Stay tuned for more. Interested in joining a future Paper Club? Apply here: https://events.ycombinator.com/ycpaperclub Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs 00:00 — Introduction by Francois Chaubard 05:47 — Yasa Baig: A World Model of Protein Biology (https://biohub.ai/esm/protein/about) 25:38 — Luke Bailey: Scaling Self-Play with Self-Guidance (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.20209) 37:51 — Arnab Maiti: Stream RAG: Instant and Accurate Spoken Dialogue Systems with Streaming Tool Usage (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02044) 47:40 — Robert George: Lean for Science: How Formal Proofs Can Change Mathematics, AI, and Scientific Computing (https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22631) 58:52 — Lukens Orthwein: Founder AI Hacks: Programming is an RTS Game Now 1:16:07 — Closing Remarks