LlamaHack
The infinite possibility of LLMs is sparking our imagination to rethink every aspect of our lives. LlamaHack was 24 fast-paced hours for students to meet new peers, ship code, and learn new frameworks — while having a bunch of fun.
- 633
- on the guest list
- 24h
- of straight building
- $143,596
- in prizes
- 9
- winning teams
What it was
A weekend of shipping with LLMs
LlamaHack was an immersive event for students exploring cutting-edge large language models — organized by the Cornell LLM Engineering Club on Roosevelt Island.
In December 2023, GPT-4 was a year old, Llama 2 was three months old, and nobody quite knew what an LLM app was supposed to look like yet. So 633 people put their names down, a few hundred showed up on a cold Saturday morning on Roosevelt Island, and 24 hours later there were working prototypes for Medicaid paperwork, news bias, physical therapy, nutrition and calmer arguments.
Nine teams took home a prize. The rest took home a weekend of building with people they had not met on Friday — which was always the actual point.
- When
- Dec 9–10, 2023 · 24 hours
- Where
- Cornell Tech, Roosevelt Island, NYC
- Who
- Students, mostly from Cornell Tech, Columbia and NYU
- Deliverable
- A pitch and a working prototype, on Devpost by 3:14 PM Sunday
Sunday, 6:30 PM
The winners
Nine teams walked out with a prize. Here are three of them — the full list has the rest.
🏆 WinnerJournal AI
A journal generated from literally all your data.
Ben Moskowitz · Shai Aarons · Jacob Ioffe · Vikranth Kanumuru
View on Devpost
🏆 WinnerSimplicaid
Turns complex Medicaid applications into a quick, accurate, stress-free process.
Maria Dobko · Kevin Xia · Valene Tjong
View on Devpost
🏆 WinnerConifer
Select any block of text and get opinions, articles and an AI summary from varied news sources.
Ethan Kiang · Daniel Tao · Luke Kim
View on DevpostMade possible by
Sponsors
Seventeen teams put up the venue, the credits, the hardware, the mentors and the boba.
How the weekend ran
Schedule
Doors at 8:30 on Saturday, git push deadline at 3:14 PM on Sunday. Pi o’clock, obviously.
Saturday
December 98:30 AM
Networking + breakfast
9:50 AM
Opening speeches
10:45 AM
Hack time
12:00 PM
Lunch
1:00 PM
More hacking + mentor support
7:00 PM
Dinner
7:30 PM
Continue hacking
Sunday
December 109:00 AM
Breakfast
10:00 AM
Keep pushing
12:00 PM
Lunch
3:14 PM
Git push deadline
4:00 PM
Hackfair — everyone demos
5:30 PM
Final demos
6:30 PM
Awards & closing ceremony
Twelve ways to win
Prizes
Three podium places plus nine sponsor tracks, so a team could win on craft, on impact, or on sheer taste in tooling.
1st place
- $10,000 AWS credits
- $800 Cohere credits
- $400 Hugging Face credits
- 4× Cornell bottles + notebooks
2nd place
- $10,000 AWS credits
- $800 Cohere credits
- $400 Hugging Face credits
- 4× Cornell bottles
3rd place
- $10,000 AWS credits
- $800 Cohere credits
- $400 Hugging Face credits
People’s choice
50 free bobas from Boba Whale · $10,000 AWS credits
Best LLM solution
1× iPad Pro · $10k CloudCodeAI credits · $10,000 AWS credits
Best use of Together AI
4× AirPods Max · $2,500 Together AI credits · $10,000 AWS credits
Best healthcare solution
2× AirPods Pro (2nd gen) · $10,000 AWS credits
Best fork of Cal.com
1× MacBook Air M2 · $10,000 AWS credits
Supabase prize
4× $250 in Supabase credits · $10,000 AWS credits
Best developer tool by Warp
4× Keychron keyboards · 4× Warp mugs · $10,000 AWS credits
Best use of LastMile AI
$200 Amazon gift card · $10,000 AWS credits
Best use of MongoDB Atlas
$10,000 AWS credits
Where the money went
$143,596 in prizes
Almost all of it in cloud and model credits, spread across twelve tracks so more than one team could win something.
Credits
$137,100
- AWS$10,000 of cloud credits on each of the 12 tracks$120,000
- CloudCode.aicredits on the Best LLM solution track$10,000
- Together AIcredits on the Best use of Together AI track$2,500
- Cohere$800 of credits on each podium place$2,400
- Hugging Face$400 of credits on each podium place$1,200
- Supabase4 × $250 of credits on the Supabase prize$1,000
Hardware & swag
$6,496
- 1× MacBook Air M2
- 1× iPad Pro
- 4× AirPods Max
- 2× AirPods Pro
- 4× Keychron keyboards
- $200 Amazon gift card
- 50 bobas from Boba Whale
- Cornell bottles, notebooks & Warp mugs
Credit figures are the per-track amounts published on Devpost, summed across the tracks that offered them.
Who picked the winners
Judges
Engineers, researchers and investors who sat through every demo on Sunday evening.
Greg Morrisett
Dean and Vice Provost at Cornell Tech
Daniel Doubrovkine
Principal engineer at AWS, former CTO at Artsy
Daniel Lobato
ML engineer at Meta, former principal engineer at Red Hat
Advait Maybhate
Software engineer at Warp and Hack the North organizer
Alex Reinhart
Investor at Pillar VC, former co-founder of Parambil
Antoni Viros
Research scientist at IBM and Cornell alum
Saurav Panda
Co-founder and CEO of CloudCode.ai
Zoe Weil
Applied staff scientist at Etsy, former chief scientist at Risalto Health
Judging criteria
- Approach & idea
- How viable is the solution and how well does it address the problem? Market strategy, feasibility, creativity.
- Product — technical
- Is there a demo? How well was the idea prototyped, and how technically impressive is it?
- Presentation
- Clear and appealing pitches are essential.
- Product — design
- How much effort and thought went into the design?
- X factor
- What makes the project extraordinary.