{"id":103024,"title":"Aster: The First YC Neolab","tagline":"Automating open-ended research.","body":"\u003chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sLwzskvqE\u003e\n\nWhen I was 18, I joined Magic, a frontier lab working on 100M token context coding models, as a reinforcement learning researcher.\n\nWhile I worked there, I gradually grew more drawn to autonomous research. I truly felt that this could automate all the work I was doing at Magic, so in January, I left to start my own lab.\n\nIntroducing Aster — a major breakthrough for research.\n\nAster isn’t a single agent. It is the first autonomous lab orchestrating **thousands of research agents in parallel.**\n\nWe pointed Aster towards ProteinGym, a benchmark that measures how accurately models predict the effects of protein mutations. It set the world record in **30 minutes**.\n\nAnd it did it efficiently:\n\n    •    57x faster than single agent systems on the same task.\n\n    •    One-third the cost for the same result.\n\nBut here’s what we realized: measurable problems are only a small sliver of research.\n\nThe hard ones were never measurable.\n\nAt Aster, we’re on a mission to automate open-ended research, research that defines its own problems before it can answer them.\n\nThe future doesn’t wait to be defined by benchmarks. Neither do we.\n\nRead our research writeups at \u003chttps://asterlab.ai\u003e.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=103024\u0026key=user_uploads/2005232/2264869d-fb12-406c-8697-c16bca2543fd)\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=103024\u0026key=user_uploads/2005232/99902341-9d08-445b-8c96-8782bc7fd65c)\n\n","slug":"Qng-aster-the-first-yc-neolab","created_at":"2026-06-13T15:47:30.808Z","updated_at":"2026-06-20T20:00:59.201Z","total_vote_count":26,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Qng-aster-the-first-yc-neolab","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":31498,"name":"Aster","slug":"asterlab","url":"https://www.asterlab.ai/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/24a27f14876befd155fa8c25b4a3056848cf5b16.png","batch":"Spring 2026","industry":"B2B","tags":[],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/31498"}}