Inference, Diffusion, World Models, and More | YC Paper Club

Even if you’re a current PhD student, 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 will meet every two weeks this summer to present and discuss new papers together. This was from our very first discussion group on May 20th, 2026, at the YC office in Mountain View, CA. Thanks to the following presenters: 0:12 - Intro from YC Visiting Partner Francois Chaubard 3:49 - Tanishq Kumar — Speculative Speculative Decoding (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03251) 18:33 - Guangyao (Stannis) Zhou — Diffusion-MPC (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05364) 30:26 - Isaac Ward — LeWorldModeling (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19312) 43:54 - Akshay Vegesna — Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02113) 51:24 - Konwoo Kim — Pretraining Under Infinite Compute (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14786)

Francois ChaubardhostTanishq KumarguestGuangyao (Stannis) ZhouguestIsaac WardguestAkshay VegesnaguestKonwoo Kimguest

May 28, 20261h 7mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: May 28, 2026
Duration: 1h 7m
Channel: Y Combinator
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Even if you’re a current PhD student, 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 will meet every two weeks this summer to present and discuss new papers together. This was from our very first discussion group on May 20th, 2026, at the YC office in Mountain View, CA. Thanks to the following presenters: 0:12 - Intro from YC Visiting Partner Francois Chaubard 3:49 - Tanishq Kumar — Speculative Speculative Decoding (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03251) 18:33 - Guangyao (Stannis) Zhou — Diffusion-MPC (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05364) 30:26 - Isaac Ward — LeWorldModeling (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19312) 43:54 - Akshay Vegesna — Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02113) 51:24 - Konwoo Kim — Pretraining Under Infinite Compute (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.14786)

SPEAKERS

Francois Chaubard
host
Host of YC Paper Club who emcees the session, introduces presenters, and runs Q&A.
Tanishq Kumar
guest
Stanford graduate student presenting work on speculative decoding and high-throughput LLM inference.
Guangyao (Stannis) Zhou
guest
Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind presenting world-modeling and diffusion/planning work for robotics.
Isaac Ward
guest
Researcher presenting a paper and discussion on world models and related design considerations.
Akshay Vegesna
guest
Q Labs co-founder/president presenting Andrew Gordon Wilson’s paper on deep learning generalization and inductive bias.
Konwoo Kim
guest
Researcher and paper co-lead presenting work on pre-training, scaling, and data efficiency under infinite compute.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Y Combinator, featuring Francois Chaubard and Tanishq Kumar, Inference, Diffusion, World Models, and More | YC Paper Club explores yC Paper Club debuts: faster inference, diffusion control, and scaling laws The event frames inference speed as a future capability bottleneck—not just a cost issue—because faster tokens-per-second enable more test-time “thinking” and higher delivered intelligence.

RELATED EPISODES