Scale hosted its first ever generative AI hackathon at our San Francisco headquarters on January 21st! We welcomed over 300 developers, engineers, and hackers from across the country to come in and create something awesome.

From side projects to chatbots, from work projects to generative art pieces — hackers submitted over 80 projects. The Hackathon was also buzzing with workshops where attendees could learn about topics like Advanced Prompt Engineering with Riley Goodside, who helped attendees incorporate the art of large language model prompting into their projects.

Besides just meeting people and hacking, hackers could walk away with cool prizes, like win Napa tours, skydiving, drones and more.

Winners Feature

First Place: GPT is All You Need for the Backend

Taking first place was a project called “GPT is all you need for the backend”. This innovative project automates backend processes with a Large Language Model (LLM). It can infer business logic based on the name of the API call and maintain state in the form of a JSON (lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write and easy for machines to parse and generate) blob. With this new tech, developers are now able to create an entire backend and database with no manual logic programming. Following the instructions, they can define their application and proceed to jump straight into making API calls.

Second Place: Chempilot

“Chempilot”, the AI-enabled SMARTS (SMiles ARbitrary Target Specification - a chemical language used to describe molecular structures and substructures) analysis project, earned second place at the hackathon. Chempilot makes it easy to search chemical databases and guide generative models, by allowing users to generate SMARTS queries from natural language descriptions of molecules. This groundbreaking project was built by leveraging GPT3 and Spellbook, while combining that with open-source datasets and libraries to build the dataset. Chempilot is incredibly useful for drug discovery, making it faster and easier than ever to find and analyze the right molecule. It’s a unique combination of AI, chemistry, and cheminformatics expertise, making it an invaluable tool for any lab.

The team behind the 'Rap Battles' project made waves with their use of generative AI to create rap battles, and won third place, as well as the Audience Choice award. Through the use of GPT-3 for lyrics, wavenet for vocals, and stable diffusion for the avatars, users can input the names of any two people and generate a rap battle between them. The team even took it one step further and launched the website on the day of the hackathon, providing a live demo of George Washington vs. Andrej Karpathy!

The project “Node Fixer”, won the Best Use of Spellbook award, and is the perfect tool for automating corrective action for syntax and runtime errors in JavaScript programs. With a combination of a VSCode extension, a rust binary, and Spellbook, Node Fixer allows developers to quickly identify and repair errors that cause their program to crash. When an error is detected, Node Fixer sends the error and the code to a Spellbook app, which then analyzes and produces a fix. The fixed code is written back into the editor, ensuring the developer can keep their program running smoothly and quickly. With Node Fixer, there is no need to manually fix trivial errors in your code.

Advanced Prompt Engineering with Riley Goodside

Riley Goodside also hosted a workshop on Advanced Prompt Engineering. Prompt engineering is the magic behind top-notch language model responses. A well-written prompt is crucial for avoiding off-topic, inconsistent, or offensive output. It's a challenging task that requires a nuanced understanding of how to talk to the models- there are research conferences and papers written on the best prompting techniques. The workshop garnered massive interest, and hackers filled up the office to learn the most innovative prompting strategies!

Our hackathon was more than just a platform for hacking on cutting-edge projects, it was a community building event for passionate builders. You could satisfy your sweet tooth with Smitten's liquid nitrogen ice cream, bond with some furry friends at the puppy cuddling station, bring your own personal style to life with live screen printing on hoodies and tees, and even fuel up with a shot of espresso from the coffee bar. With so much to do and so many amazing people to meet, the hackathon was a prime opportunity for hackers to dive into generative AI and meet legends in the field.

P.S. some of our favorite tweets about the hackathon :)