๐ Australia's AI Research Hackathon
โJoin us for a weekend solving some of the most interesting and cutting edge problems in AI, from RL and agents to mechanistic interpretability.
โWhat We're Building
โWhether you're an engineer who wants to work on improving AI safety, a student building your first agent, or someone who's been itching to train your own model for a novel use case, we want you to come and get stuck in!
โWith generous compute credits for each participant courtesy of our friends at Runpod, you can actually train real models over the weekend โ with the winning team taking home $2,500 worth of compute credits!
โWe also have an awesome set of judges lined up for this event including AI researchers from Canva, Exa Labs and EleutherAI who will be around over the weekend to help answer questions and provide guidance on project ideas.
โDonโt have a problem in mind to solve yet? No worries, we have a few suggested categories:
โ๐ฌ Mechanistic Interpretability
โPro-human AI, AI safety & mechanistic interpretability of neural networks. Understand whatโs really happening in neural networks and help build systems that support human flourishing!
โExample projects: Check out Luciaโs project ideas here, and Ethan's project ideas here!
โNew to interp? Check out: Anthropic's transformer circuits | Neel Nanda's tutorials
โ๐ค AI Agents in the Wild
โAI agents have shown remarkable potential at solving real world problems either autonomously or assisting a human, particularly in the domains of coding, customer service and personal assistance. We believe there are many more domains AI agents have yet to transform.
โYour mission: This category encourages you to pick an area youโre interested in and build an agent to automate it or assist humans with it.
โ๐ง Long-Horizon RL Training
โModels like DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI o1/o3 proved that long-horizon RL (RLVR) can drastically improve performance in a specific domain such as coding or maths.
โHowever, creating high quality datasets outside of math and code remain an unsolved problem, and for long running tasks, creating intermediate RL rewards is also an area of active work.
โYour challenge: This category encourages you to pick a task youโre interested in training models on, and come up with a smart new way of automatically generating the data needed for RL training.
โThe Details
โ๐ Venue
โAn awesome venture studio and co-working space in the heart of Redfern.
โBring your laptop and curiosity, we'll provide food, caffeine, and good vibes!
โ๐ป Compute Credits
โThanks to our wonderful friends at RunPod, every participant will get $50 in compute credits to use across all Runpod services over the weekend!
โ๐ฅ Teams
โCome solo or with friends. Need a team? We'll sort it out during kickoff!
โ๐ Prizes:
โGrand Prize: $2,500 of Runpod credits
โ+ Additional prizes TBA (watch this space!)
โJudges
โEthan Smith โ Lead AI Researcher @ Canva
โEthan co-founded Leonardo.Ai, where he was the head of research.
โWilliam Li โ Member of Technical Staff @ Exa Labs
โWill was a senior ML engineer at Atlassian and led development of Rovo Deep Research.
โLucia Quirke โ Member of Technical Staff @ EleutherAI
โLucia was an engineer at Atlassian and Canva before transitioning to AI research through the MATS scholarship.
โWho Should Join?
โEngineers & researchers interested in AI
โStudents eager to ship real projects
โDesigners who want to shape AI experiences
โDomain experts looking to apply AI to their field
โAnyone excited about pushing the frontier!
โSchedule
โSaturday, November 22nd
โ9:00 AM โ Doors open | Coffee, chats & intros
โ10:00 AM โ Hackathon kickoff | Team formation
โ12:00 PM โ Lunch
โ6:00 PM โ Dinner
โ9:00 PM โ Doors close (or take it home!)
โSunday, November 23rd
โ9:00 AM โ Doors open
โ1:00 PM โ Lunch
โ4:00 PM โ Submissions due
โ5:00 PM โ Team pitches
โ6:00 PM โ Judging & prizes
โSponsors
โHuge thanks to RunPod for providing compute credits and prize money! ๐
โAnd to Canva for sponsoring the event
โAnd to the awesome team at Helix Collective for letting us use their incredible space!
โ
โ๐ฏ Interested in sponsoring? Reach out to mahlen.ty@gmail.com
โQuestions?
โDM us!