Frontier Bits: AI Lectures and Papers 001 - Koramangala, Namma Bengaluru

🌟 Frontier Bits is Soket's curated series of deep technical conversations for those at the frontier of AI. Each session gathers researchers, engineers, and practitioners to explore the latest advances in:

• Foundation models
• Training systems
• Inference
• Multimodal AI
• Emerging research

🔍 These are not introductory talks or product presentations; they are technical deep dives focused on first-principles thinking, rigorous discussion, and idea exchange among individuals actively building the next generation of AI systems.

🤝 Collaboration: This first offline edition is in partnership with the amazing community of Women in Product.

👥 Who Should Attend:

• Researchers
• ML engineers
• Infrastructure engineers
• AI practitioners
• Technical leaders working on or supporting frontier AI systems.

If your interests include:

• Large-scale pretraining
• Post-training
• Reasoning models
• Agentic systems
• Inference optimization
• Multimodal models
• Model evaluation
• AI infrastructure
• Harness engineering
• Cutting-edge AI research

you’ll find yourself among peers!

🗓️ Agenda:

• 7:00 – 8:00 PM
  Research Paper Deep Dive: On-Policy Distillation
  We’ll cover the evolution of OPD using the following resources:

  1. ThinkingMachine - On-Policy Distillation Blog 2025
  2. HuggingFace - Unlocking On-Policy Distillation for Any Model Family 2025
  3. Nvidia - X-Token: Projection-Guided Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation Paper

• 8:00 – 9:00 PM
  Technical Lecture & Discussion: Nvidia Megatron Framework for Large Scale Training
  A deep dive into Megatron, Nvidia's large-scale model training framework.
  Paper: Nvidia Megatron

• 9:00 – 10:00 PM
  Networking
  Continue conversations over snacks and drinks with fellow researchers, engineers, founders, and builders in the AI ecosystem.

🎟️ Attendance:
Seats are intentionally limited to keep discussions interactive and high signal. Applications will be reviewed, and the exact venue will be shared with accepted attendees.
If the phrase "research paper reading session" excites you, you'll likely feel right at home at Frontier Bits!