Announcing: AI Tinkerers Summer Hackathon 2024

Join us for a day of building and innovating at the AI Tinkerers Summer Hackathon 2024, sponsored by Ascend and Thinkspace and brought to you by OpenPipe and Moondream!

This hackathon invites you to explore the exciting world of open source generative AI, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with these powerful technologies. Whether you’re passionate about fine-tuning models for specific applications, building innovative vision-based apps, or exploring entirely new avenues of generative AI, this is your chance to unleash your creativity and make a real impact.

🏆 Prizes

We’re offering three exciting prizes for the top teams:

• Overall Best Hack: Awarded to the team with the most innovative and impactful project overall.
• Best Fine-Tuned App: Recognizing excellence in leveraging fine-tuning and deploying custom open source models.
• Best Vision App: Celebrating the most creative and effective use of open source vision language models for visual understanding tasks.

Judges will be announced soon, and all participants will have the opportunity to showcase their work to the event sponsors and the broader AI community.

🤖 Who is this for?

This is aimed at developers who are interested in getting their hands dirty learning and building AI tech together. You should know how to code, but you don’t need to be an AI expert!

📅 When & Where

This is an in-person hackathon taking place in Seattle on Saturday, June 15th, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Bring a team of your own or form a team at the outset of the event. Location will be available to participants after registration.

☝️☝️There is no fee to enter but space is limited and we will be screening attendance, so please register ASAP☝️☝️

(Photos: AI Tinkerers Summer Hackathon 2024)

Vik from Moondream

Kyle from OpenPipe

👑 Sponsors

The event is generously sponsored by Ascend, who will be providing food, drinks, and prizes valued at up to ███ each. We’re also thrilled to be hosted by Moondream and OpenPipe, who will be on hand to support teams who choose to tinker on/with their platforms.

Ascend

Ascend is a pre-seed venture capital firm investing in both AI infrastructure and what we call SaaS 3.0: AI-native vertical software applications disrupting the b2b software status quo. Kirby Winfield, Founding General Partner; Associate Nate Bek; and Partner and Chief of Staff Jen Haller work to support portfolio founders on their journey from the idea stage to seed, series A, and beyond - connecting them with customers, talent, and Silicon Valley venture capital.

Thinkspace

Thinkspace is the premier coworking and office space provider, chosen by over 600 entrepreneurs, founders, and freelancers for its exceptional amenities and supportive community. With locations in Seattle and Redmond, Thinkspace offers ultra-fast gigabit internet, 24/7 access, private offices, and inspiring views of Lake Union. As a venue sponsor for the AI Tinkerers Hackathon, Thinkspace brings together brilliant minds in a dynamic environment designed to foster innovation, collaboration, and success. Join us at Thinkspace, where ideas thrive and entrepreneurs succeed!

🧑‍⚖️ Judges

🤖 Mentors / Hosts

Moondream

Moondream is an innovative open-source computer-vision model designed to answer real-world questions about images with remarkable speed and accuracy. With just 1.8 billion parameters, it can run on almost any hardware, including edge and mobile. This means you can process images and video frames locally, without any worries about latency, cost, or security. Moondream excels in delivering high-performance image analysis. Whether it’s identifying objects, generating detailed image captions, or supporting multimodal tasks, Moondream stands out for its versatility and ease of use in diverse environments. It can even be fine-tuned should you need that. Join us at the hackathon to explore the full potential of Moondream and create groundbreaking applications!

OpenPipe

OpenPipe is revolutionizing the way companies train and deploy custom fine-tuned models, offering an intuitive platform that dramatically reduces costs and deployment time. By providing tools to automatically capture data, train models with just a few clicks, and scale deployments efficiently, OpenPipe empowers businesses to create high-performance models tailored to their specific needs. Trusted by leading engineers and companies, OpenPipe delivers 14x cost savings compared to traditional solutions like GPT-4, while maintaining superior quality. Join our hackathon to explore how OpenPipe can streamline your machine learning workflows and accelerate your innovation!

AI Tinkerers

AI Tinkerers is a dynamic global network of AI experts and hands-on builders dedicated to advancing the field of artificial intelligence through collaboration and innovation. Our members, who come from diverse technical, machine learning, and entrepreneurial backgrounds, are united by their passion for developing cutting-edge AI-powered applications and pushing the boundaries of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI. We host regular meetups across numerous cities worldwide, providing a platform for members to share ideas, experiment, and create transformative AI solutions. Join us at our hackathon to connect with like-minded AI tinkerers, share your expertise, and help shape the future of AI.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, we also plan to have a regular monthly AI Tinkerers Meetup in June in addition to this hackathon.