Daytona AI Researchers - Stanford, July 21, 2026

On Tuesday, July 21, Daytona & FounderCoHo are again co-hosting an exclusive, high-signal evening dedicated to researchers at Stanford University to explore when we take long-horizon, stateful agents seriously - from the infrastructure that makes them possible, to the evaluation frameworks that make them trustworthy.

Agenda

5:30 pm - 5:35 pm

Welcome & Opening Remarks

Marijan Cipcic, Principal Events Manager at Daytona

5:35 pm - 5:50 pm

Talk "Today's Agents Don't Live In Episodes"

Muhammad Annas Hashmi, DevRel at Daytona

Outline:

The 'episode' (short, stateless, resettable) has been RL's foundational abstraction since ATARI. It underpins the Gym API, GRPO, PPO, & the conventional sandbox lifecycle. Today's agents no longer fit it. Tasks span for days; the env state at hour 18 of an agent session with warm caches, installed deps, live processes, open sockets, dirty git tree, is worth hours of wall clock to reproduce.

Three things are scaling simultaneously. Rollout horizon: seconds -> days. Env state: disposable between episodes -> first-class learning substrate. Branching: absent in modern LLM-RL -> speculative fork trees. Each stresses the inherited toolkit in a different way, & all three have been gated on the same missing primitives: VMs you can fork cheaply, pause without killing processes, snapshot mid-run, & resume hours later.

This talk walks through what opens up when those primitives become available. Live demo of long-horizon sessionful rollouts, mid-trajectory forking, & cross-calendar-time training. The research questions that follow (long-horizon benchmarks, speculative RL algorithms, event-driven training, to name a few) are where the next wave of agent RL gets built.

5:50 pm - 6:05 pm

Talk "We Scaled Data Wrong"

Jun Park, CEO at hillclimb

Outline:

For every significant leap in model intelligence, there was a massive dataset that helped us get there. The first chatbots had common crawl, coding agents had github. The next jump in model intelligence requires hyperspecialized training data (finance, health, law, etc) yet we don't have it. What have we, as an industry, done wrong?

6:05 pm - 6:20 pm

Talk TBA

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6:20 pm - 6:35 pm

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6:35 pm - 6:50 pm

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6:50 pm - 8:30 pm

Networking

With food & beverages

About event

An engaging meetup designed for AI researchers to connect, share ideas, & explore the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. The event features informal networking, short talks, & discussions on current research trends, fostering collaboration & knowledge exchange within the AI community.