Announcing Summer AI Hackathon

We are thrilled to announce the AI Tinkerers Summer Hackathon taking place this June 10th in Seattle, sponsored by AWS Startups, Cohere and Madrona Venture Group with support from Pinecone, Weaviate and Blueprint AI.

UPDATE: Thank you all for an incredible event

We are delighted to announce that the AI Tinkerers Summer Hackathon, which took place on June 10th in Seattle, was a smashing success! It was proudly sponsored by AWS Startups, Cohere, Madrona Venture Group, and supported by Pinecone, Weaviate, and Blueprint AI. The event drew around 100 participants, who competed in teams and individually for incredible prizes and endless bragging rights.

The day began with a special keynote speech by Ivan Zhang, the co-founder and CTO of Cohere, and proceeded with an intense day of building amazing projects. Throughout the event, participants had access to mentoring from industry experts like Vijaye Raji, Justin Uberti, Ankur Mehrotra, and many more.

After a hard day of working, the competitors presented their projects to the judges, who evaluated their ideas based on a range of factors, including imagination, practicality, and completeness. Six brilliant teams made it to the finals, showcasing their cutting-edge projects that spanned across various domains of Artificial Intelligence.

The big winners of the event were:

1st Place: Sherlock AI - Ramsey Khadder, Pratik Prakash, Reza Salehi
2nd Place: Privacy.ai - Nabanita De
3rd Place: AnswerCast - Aaron Correya, Sambrit Adhikari, Laksh Advani, Srishti Bhargava, Anirudth Nambirajan

These winners received a range of prizes, including cloud credits from our sponsors, limited-edition hats, and invitations to a VIP dinner on Sunday night. All participants also got a limited-edition event t-shirt as a memento of their participation, and early access to a new Cohere API.

The event concluded with a networking reception, allowing participants, judges, and sponsors to mingle, share their experiences, and forge new connections in the AI industry.

We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all participants, mentors, judges, and sponsors for their incredible support and dedication in making the AI Tinkerers Summer Hackathon a truly memorable event. Stay tuned for more photos and highlights from the event!

All Teams / Demos

At the AI Tinkerers hackathon, participants showcased a diverse range of projects demonstrating the power and versatility of artificial intelligence. Teams presented innovative solutions for summarizing and engaging with WWDC videos, streamlining data retrieval from content-creator webpages, enhancing style transfer in instructional content, and many more. Health-focused applications, team collaboration platforms, video generation tools, and personal fitness assistants were among the highlights, revealing the potential impact of AI in various aspects of daily life and multiple industries. Overall, the event was a thought-provoking display of creativity, technical acumen, and collaborative problem-solving.

1. ChatWWDC: Summarize and answer questions about Apple WWDC videos, team members: Allen, Eric Kennedy.
2. Data Detox: Clean data retrieval and QA for content-creator webpages, team members: Allen, Thomas, Arun, Anton.
3. Decoupage: Advanced style transfer for EdTech instructional videos, team members: Allen, Yannis Siglidis, Ilan Manouach, Marianne Goldin.
4. Dr.R: Comprehensive health tracker and advisor, team members: Allen, Hyunggil Woo, Richard, Yong Huang, William Kearns, Young.
5. QARetrieval3: Personal indexed data powered by blockchain, team members: Allen, Frank.
6. TBD LLM Evaluation API “Gauge”: Project details to be defined, team members: Allen, Roger Hu, Killian Lucas.
7. Vectel: Telemetry and metrics for vector search, team members: Allen, Feyman, Siddarth, Yusuf.
8. Watto AI: Integrate and generate content from different platforms, team members: Allen, Ishita Bhandari, Rishabh Panwar.
9. A Better Pipeline: Real-time data pipeline for LLM apps, team members: Bezos, Emaline Gayhart, Ian Ito, Andrei Lin, Yujian Tang.
10. AnswerCast: Video output for answering questions from missed meetings, team members: Bezos, Aaron, Sambrit, Laksh, Srishti, Anirudth.
11. Film Making Co-Pilot: AI assistance for film post-production, team members: Bezos, Bury Huang, Tian Lan.
12. Go Team: Intelligent search system for e-commerce, member: Bezos (Sean Fuller).
13. Living Danger Zone: App for improving partner conversations, team members: Bezos, Angela Nguyen, Leon Verdin.
14. PresenterPro AI: Generate engaging presentations from documents, team members: Bezos, Ravi Mandliya, Chakkaradeep Chandran.
15. Project You-tenberg: Classic literature for social media generation, team members: Bezos, Juan Marron, Michael Benedict.
16. The Narrator: Web application for generating audiobooks, team members: Bezos, Adele Beitvashahi, Danny Tayara.
17. Bitchroma: Open source tool for vector DB exposure, team members: Gates, Gary O’Keeffe.
18. Sherlock AI: Code documentation and support assistant, team members: Gates, Ramsey, Pratik, Reza.
19. GameSherpa: AI for gathering user context in gaming, team members: Gates, Ty Fiero, Dylan Merideth.
20. Lemma AI: LLM evaluation app, team members: Gates, Aerin Kim, Kalie Uberti.
21. NeRF Coach: AI personal fitness assistant, team members: Gates, Achyut, Angelo, Svyat, Arman.
22. Privacy.ai: Privacy considerations of AI, team member: Gates (Nabanita De).
23. TeamSyncGPT: Innovative team collaboration platform, team members: Gates, Sid Uppal, Rakesh Saini.
24. Stable Dock: Stable Diffusion Dockerized on AWS, team member: Stable Dock (John Tigue)

Event Photos

UPDATE 6-6-23: Registration is officially closed. We have sent confirmations and entry QR-codes to all participants who have secured a spot at the event. Due to an overwhelming response and high interest, we regretfully couldn’t accommodate everyone this time!

🗓️ Schedule of Events (updated 6/6/23)

🍔🍇🥕☕🍺🥐 Food and Drink

We will have plenty of food, drink and snacks throughout the day starting with pastries and coffee in the morning, a full lunch, snacks throughout the day and appetizers + drinks during the reception.

🏆 Speakers, Sponsors, and Prizes

We have lined up a panel of distinguished AI industry judges, including Ivan Zhang (co-founder and CTO of Cohere), Vijaye Raji (Founder & CEO of Statsig), Ankur Mehrotra of AWS Machine Learning, Justin Uberti, Co-Founder and CTO, Fixie.ai, Tim Chen, General Partner at Essence VC, Tyson Trautmann, VP of Engineering, Fauna, and Jon Turow (partner at Madrona Venture Group) and more.

Compete for prizes including cloud credits from our sponsors, some cool hats, bragging rights and an invitation to a VIP dinner on Sunday night. Every participant will receive a limited-edition event t-shirt.

📜 Rules

• The presentation should be a demo of running code and can’t be PowerPoint slides.
• PowerPoint slides can be used to set up the premise.
• Recorded video of code running is acceptable (due to the potential flakiness of demos).
• Maximum of 5 minutes per team.

(h/t to Vijaye Raji, Founder & CEO, Statsig)

Please note:

• We are allowing participants to work in teams or individually. We will facilitate a team formation for those who wish to partner up during the event.
• We will clarify more about the specific prize tiers and judging criteria before the event.

📅 When & Where

This is an in-person hackathon and will take place at Create 33 in downtown Seattle and will be an in-person event lasting all day on Saturday. Bring a team of your own or form a team at the outset of the event.

💃 Awards Ceremony and Reception

Around 6pm, after the awards ceremony, we’ll have a networking reception with appetizers and a bar so you can get to know your fellow tinkerers, judges and sponsors a bit better.

📝 Registration & Participation

Register now to get on the list. Depending on the level of interest, we may follow-up with additional steps such as a quick application process.

We are open to teams as well as individuals who are interested in joining or recruiting team mates. For individuals, we will facilitate a team formation process to allow individuals to form teams on the spot based on areas of interest and skillsets.

🧐 FAQ

Q: I was interested in attending the hackathon with some collaborators that are remote - would that be possible? I have already RSVP’ed. Should they rsvp as well if they won’t be there in person?
A: The norm for the event is to be in-person. That said, it’s okay if you have remote teammates. If they have RSVP’d, please email [email protected] so he can be mark them such that they don’t take up spots for other in-person attendees. Keep in mind there will be no t-shirts or food for remote participants.

Q: Will the event be livestreamed?
A: Nope, sorry.

Q: What is AI Tinkerers?
A: AI Tinkerers is a meetup for practitioners with technical, machine learning, and entrepreneurial backgrounds who are actively building and working with foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs). It meets roughly once per month and there are chapters in multiple cities.

Q: is there a specific goal or theme for the hackathon? Or is it open to all AI related ideas?
A: It’s open to all AI related ideas. The judges will be looking for innovations that demonstrate the use of generative and large language models to create applications that solve problem, demonstrate novel new approaches or simply delight in their creative application of these emerging technologies.

Q: Will folks work alone or as a team?
A: It’s entirely up to you. If you would like to form a team with other participants, we’ve set up a Discord channel to facilitate. The Discord invite link will be emailed to confirmed participants.

Q: Are there any requirements for the programming languages or platforms used in the projects?
A: No, there are no specific requirements for the programming languages or platforms used in the projects. Participants are welcome to use any programming languages or platforms they feel comfortable with and that best suit their project ideas.

Q: Is there a participation fee for the event?
A: No, there is no participation fee for the event. Food, drinks, and limited-edition event t-shirts will be provided free of charge to the participants.

Q: Can we bring our own tech equipment such as laptops, tablets, or other devices to the event?
A: Yes, you are welcome to bring your own tech equipment to the event. Please make sure to have all the necessary tools and software installed on your devices before arriving at the venue.

Q: Are there any restrictions on the size of the teams?
A: There are no strict restrictions on the size of the teams. However, we recommend keeping teams to a manageable size of around 4-6 members to ensure effective collaboration and efficient use of time during the event.

Q: How will the winning projects be chosen?
A: The winning projects will be selected by the panel of distinguished AI industry judges based on multiple factors such as innovation, effective use of generative and large language models, creative problem-solving, and the overall quality of the presented demo.

Q: Will there be Internet access provided at the venue?
A: Yes, there will be free Wi-Fi access at the event venue. However, we encourage participants to have backup offline solutions in case of connection issues.

😃 Organizers

🧑‍⚖️ Judges