Two-day hackathon kicks off AI Engineer World’s Fair

While the World’s Fair officially kicks off today a bunch of keen developers were in early, taking part in a hackathon that is offering $35,000 in prizes and credits.

Teams worked to develop AI-powered apps, but with a twist. The organizers weren’t really looking for basic apps that can just perform a single function or task. Instead, the organizers explained, they were looking for code that will learn and develop with minimal user input.

For example a team calling itself SplatForge wrote an app from scratch that had a 93% success rate in identifying and manipulating objects virtually. It linked up with Google’s Gemini engine, which then began suggesting improvements to the application’s performance.

“It adds new edge cases that the AI can improve from,” said the team leader “This is something I feel is missing today.”

Team Rote claimed that they have built the fastest AI system in the world. “Today an agent computer use can operate a real browser or desktop app, but that live reasoning

expensive unit, you repeat the same workflow. Rote turns these successful runs into memory. So, once a run is executed by a computer use agent,” explained the team leader.

“Here we're using Gemini. Another agent actually reasons and records what happens, so it compiles a run into a reusable skill. It verifies it and stores it in our shared database using MongoDB, so that the next request from anyone around the world can execute the same command instantly.”

This not only increases the speed of the system, it reduces the cost, the team said. Users save on not running the same query again and again, a useful trick given the cost of tokens these days and the continuing upward trend in cost from suppliers.

There are also guardrails built into the system to stop confidential information from users who aren’t cleared. Credentials can be set for each user or rolled out across groups - both on a physical network and over the cloud.

While the rest of San Francisco was out partying for Pride, or watching soccer matches, these developers have been coding solidly since Saturday - with the traditional support from energy drinks - and judges have been keeping a close eye on proceedings.

Hackathons are famous for producing code that makes it into wider use. For example, the Facebook Like button was built in an internal hackathon, although Mark Zuckerberg hated it at first. Hopefully this weekend’s competition will produce useful results.