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PhD in Natural Language Processing | Applied Generative AI Researcher & Developer | Lead Data Scientist @GovTech
I won 400 million by coming in second in smol hackathon! (API token credits from Groq and JigsawStack, that is, not cash. ?? But hey, that’s worth around 400 USD! And I also got a cool Raspberry Pi from Homebrew Research!) It has been a long time since I took part in a hackathon in my private capacity, and the first time I joined a hackathon as an individual. I definitely wasn’t expecting to win anything. In fact, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to produce anything at the end of 6 hours, and embarrass myself at the demo. ?? After racking my brain for the past week, I came up with an idea to solve a problem I’m facing: Every time I visit my 90-year-old grandma who’s living with my 70-year-old uncle, both of whom don’t understand English, they will pass me a pile of letters to read. So, instead of spending quality time with my grandma who’s getting on in her years, I spend a lot of time reading letters, most of which do not require any action to be taken. Using smol models from Jigsaw Stack and Groq (everything was less than 10b parameters; no multimodal models used), I built a Telegram bot which will tell them in one sentence (in Chinese) what they need to do with a letter (they just need to take a picture of it). If they have more questions, they can continue to talk to the bot using voice messages (they don't know how to type)?and the bot will answer them in Chinese (both in text and in voice). I was really lucky that despite my solution not being very technologically sophisticated, the problem resonated with the judges and my presentation passed the “vibe check”!??? Winning a prize was a bonus; what was more important was that we had fun! I am glad that I had the opportunity to meet other developers in the community who are much more proficient and passionate than me, and see first-hand the amazing things they could build in just 6 hours. Thank you, Yoeven D Khemlani and Gabriel Chua for organising the event, and Groq, JigsawStack, Homebrew Research, and Antler for sponsoring it!