First Event in 2021: GPT-3 Hackathon

tl;dr

• What? 2-day long Hackathon around OpenAI's GPT-3 text generation API.
• When? 5th to 7th of March.
• Where? Online.
  Registration? Set your RSVP in Meetup for the supporting program and register using the following link, if you plan to participate in the hackathon: https://hack-gpt.eventbrite.de
• Who? Everyone is welcome, independent of your technical skills and project ideas.
• Costs? As usual, the whole event is free of charge.
  Requirements? You don't necessarily need to program. GPT-3 can be accessed through a simple web interface where text queries can be entered. See https://beta.openai.com/ for usage examples.

GPT-what?
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GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer and is at its core a Self-Attention based language model. Trained on massive amounts of data, it shows incredible generalization capabilities on all kinds of NLP tasks. Since the approach was originally proposed by OpenAI in 2018, the model has grown steadily in terms of number of parameters and training data. The third iteration, GPT-3, released in mid-2020, consists of 175 billion parameters and has since made countless headlines for its incredible one-shot text generation capabilities, but also for the dangers it could impose.

While a pre-trained model has not yet been released, OpenAI has made GPT-3 available via an API that is currently still in closed beta with a very limited number of invitations. We are now pleased to announce that OpenAI will be giving our group members exclusive access to GPT-3 over the course of a hackathon.

You will have an entire weekend to tackle business or research ideas, write productivity apps to make your or others' lives easier, develop human-like chatbots, or just convince yourself of the current state of text generation technology. We welcome any ideas and contributions, be it just asking the AI for its favorite video games.

Date & Schedule
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The event will take place entirely online, starting with an opening presentation on Friday, 5th March. From Friday evening until Sunday the 7th, you will have time to work on your ideas and projects before finally pitching them to your peers and our expert jury. The best projects will be awarded with various prizes.

In addition to the hackathon, there will be different presentations and talks.

The final event schedule will be provided in the following weeks.

Registration
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If you plan to attend only the supporting events, set your RVSP in Meetup accordingly. Since this is an online-only event, there is no limit to the number of participants.

If you plan to also participate in the hackathon and use the GPT-3 API, register using the following link: https://hack-gpt.eventbrite.de . The number of hackathon participants is currently limited to 200. Due to this limitation, please update your registration status if you are unlikely to end up participating.

Requirements
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Programming knowledge is beneficial, but not required. The interface to the GPT-3 API is relatively simple and can also be used via a graphical interface or tools like Postman.

Even without programming knowledge, it should be possible to test the capabilities of the model for various types of queries or problems on domain-specific data. All types of findings are welcome.

Preparation
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You are free and even encouraged to do any kind of preparation before the event, including data collection or setting up your development environment.
However, to keep it fair for all participants, access to the API will be enabled just before the official start of the event and will be available at least until the project pitches are completed.

Final Word
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Register as soon as possible to get a secure spot, spread the word, tell your friends and family, and stock up on coffee to get you through the extra long work week.

Any updates to the event schedule will be provided as soon as possible. So stay tuned.