As a frequent hackathon judge, I’m shocked at the evolution
My view from the front lines of AI in SF and Silicon Valley on the one-year anniversary since GPT became publicly available.
GPT has taken the world by storm with over 100M users—one of the fastest adoption rates ever, thanks to its simplicity of use with a text-based interface, requiring no coding.
I love judging AI hackathons, I’ve judged several since spring, and a few AI founders said I’m the most frequent AI hackathon judge in SF, a title I hold with pride, as I love to serve the tech ecosystem.
As a frequent Hackathon judge, I’m witnessing OpenAI’s evolution first hand, as teams push GPT’s capabilities in two days.
- A Hackathon is a 2-3 day event (usually on weekends) where developers form teams to build working prototype projects and compete for prizes.
- While most projects won’t evolve into full-fledged companies, Hackathons showcase the potential of emerging technology and offer me a chance to meet founders for potential future investments.
- A distinctive trend in the AI market is non-technical teams assembling to leverage AI for coding. At these events, the critical factor is a unique business solution to real-world problems or access to untapped data sets.
In Spring 2023, small hackathon teams could use GPT to create a simple text-based chat bot in two days.
Fast forward to November, I’ve judged several hackathons in SF and witnessed astonishing advancements.
Several months later, in Winter 2023, small hackathon teams now can assemble “sentient creatures” like a 4-year old, in two days:
- “Seeing” with GPT-4 computer vision, what’s happening in the real world,
- “Hearing” via voice commands and ambient sounds in the real world,
- “Thinking” through processing the above real-world input,
- “Learning” by accessing the pre-trained data GPT offers,
- “Referencing” exclusive data sets using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG),
- “Speaking” with life-like audio voices, that have inflection and tone in any language,
- “Writing” through text communication, in any format or style required,
- “Drawing” by creating images spontaneously.
- “Interacting”: it proactively can engage in dialog, ask questions, or assign AI agents to complete tasks on their own.
In mere months, GPT-powered AI Hackathon projects have evolved from simple text-based chatbots to entities exhibiting sentience similar to that of a 4-year-old.
I’ve been in Silicon Valley for 27 years, and have experienced five waves: I was an intern in DotCom, founder in Social era, founder in sharing economy, was a CMO in Web3, and am now head-first in the AI wave.
Friends: I’ve. Never. Seen. Such. Rapid. Evolution. In. Such. A. Short. Time.
It’s very clear that AI is evolving faster than a humans can, this is exponential capabilities in such as short time.
I’m committed to this AI wave and I’m excited to announce on Linkedin that I’ve become a General Partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, where I will be a Venture Capital Investor in AI startups, alongside my friend of 20 years, Chris Yeh.
(This content was originally written by Organic Jeremiah and then copy-edited using GPT-4)
