Dates

Hackathon opens: July 11, 2026, 12:00pm Taipei time (UTC+8)
Submission deadline: October 1, 2026, 11:45pm (UTC+8)
Judging period: October 1 to October 7, 2026
Winners announced and virtual closing ceremony: October 8, 2026

All deadlines are in Taipei time (UTC+8). Please convert to your own local time before submitting. For reference, the submission deadline is 3:45pm UTC on October 1, which is 11:45am in New York and 4:45pm in London.

Eligibility

  • Who can enter: GIBC V2 is open to students worldwide, at any level from middle school through university.
  • Age: Participants must be 13 or older. Participants under 18 should have permission from a parent or guardian to enter and to have their name published on their project page, which is required for certificates.
  • Location: Open to all countries and territories except those excluded under Devpost's standard terms and applicable sanctions law.
  • Excluded: Companies and professional organizations may not enter as an entity. GIBC organizers, judges, and their immediate family members may not submit projects.
  • Team size: Enter alone or in a team of up to 6 people.
  • One project, one track: Each team submits exactly one project to exactly one track. An individual may only be a member of one submitting team. You cannot join two teams in order to enter two tracks.

Track requirements

Your project must clearly fit the technical definition of the track you chose. Judges may reassign or disqualify a project submitted to the wrong track.

Track 01: TECH (Foundational LLM Development)

  • Your model must have no more than 50,000,000 total trainable parameters. This count includes token embeddings and the output head.
  • Your repository must include a script or printed output showing the parameter count, plus your model config.
  • Your model must be trained from scratch. You may not initialize from pretrained weights, fine-tune an existing model, or distill from a larger model.
  • You may use standard frameworks and libraries (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, Hugging Face transformers, tokenizer libraries and similar), and you may use existing public datasets (FineWeb, TinyStories, The Pile and similar). "From scratch" refers to the weights and the training run, not to reinventing your tooling. Credit everything you use in Built With and your README.
  • You may not use a hosted inference API, including the Featherless sponsor perk, as the model itself. Sponsor API access is for tooling, data processing, and evaluation, not as your submission.
  • Reporting: your README must state the hardware you trained on, total training time, and approximate compute used. Training efficiency is a scored criterion and cannot be judged without this.
  • Evaluation: projects are scored on HellaSwag, ARC-Easy, PIQA, and WinoGrande via lm-evaluation-harness, plus perplexity on a held-out slice of WikiText-103. Report your numbers in your README and include the evaluation script you used.

Track 02: Applied (Medical Technology & Finance)

  • Your project must be built on empirical, real-world data and must implement predictive machine learning, a diagnostic pipeline, or an automated financial system.
  • Data ethics, mandatory. You must use publicly available or fully de-identified datasets. Do not submit projects that use identifiable patient data, personal health records, or any dataset you do not have the right to use. Cite the source and license of every dataset in your README.
  • No live deployment. Projects must not be operated on real patients, real clinical decisions, or real money. Trading systems must run in simulation or on historical data only.
  • Not a product. All submissions are research prototypes. They are not medical devices, not diagnostic tools, and not financial advice. Your README must say so.

Track 03: Open (General Technical Invention)

  • Build a working prototype that demonstrates technical novelty. Software, hardware, interactive media, generative systems, or any combination.
  • No architectural or resource limits apply.

All tracks: we do not accept theoretical papers, design documents, or slide decks alone. There must be running code, a working system, or a functioning physical build.

What to submit

All six components must be complete on Devpost before the deadline.

  1. Project description on your Devpost project page: what you built, what problem it solves, and how it works.
  2. Source code: a link to a public repository on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Hugging Face. It must include a README with setup instructions, prerequisites, and how to run it.
  3. Demo video: 2 to 5 minutes, on YouTube, Vimeo, or Youku. Unlisted is fine. Private is not. The video must show the project running and explain your approach. English audio or English subtitles required.
  4. Built With: every technology, framework, library, API, dataset, and hardware component used.
  5. Team information: all members listed by real full name. Each teammate needs a Devpost account and must be added to the submission, or they will not appear and will not receive a certificate. Names appear publicly on the project page and are used to issue certificates.
  6. Screenshots: at least 3 images showing your interface, pipeline, training curves, or physical build.

Original work, third-party code, and AI tools

  • Original work: your project must be built during the hackathon period, July 11 to October 1, 2026. Submitting a pre-existing project, a commercial product, or work that is substantially the same as a previous hackathon entry will be disqualified.
  • Third-party code is allowed. Open-source libraries, frameworks, public datasets, templates, and pretrained components (where your track permits them) are fine. Credit them in Built With and your README.
  • AI coding assistants are allowed with no restrictions. You may use Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, ChatGPT, v0, or any similar tool. You must disclose it: list the AI tools you used in Built With and note in your README which parts of the project were AI-assisted. Undisclosed use is treated as misrepresentation. You are responsible for everything you submit and must be able to explain how your code works if a judge asks.
  • Repository state at the deadline is what gets judged. Commits pushed after the deadline may be disregarded.

Access and language

  • Your repository must be public and unrestricted. Document any paid API keys, unusual dependencies, or special environments in your README so judges can evaluate without them.
  • If a judge cannot access your video or repository, we will attempt to contact the team once through Devpost. If we receive no response within 48 hours, the submission is not reviewed.
  • All descriptions, documentation, and video demonstrations must be in English.

Judging criteria and winner selection

Judges score each project only against the criteria for its own track. Criteria from other tracks do not apply to your submission.

  • Track 01 (LLM): Perplexity & Accuracy, Reasoning Performance, Training Efficiency, Innovation, Documentation & Demo
  • Track 02 (Med/Finance): Innovation & Impact, Technical Feasibility, Rigor & Validation, Presentation
  • Track 03 (Open): Creativity, Execution, Impact, Presentation

Full criterion descriptions are on the Overview page.

Selection: judges score all eligible submissions within their assigned track. The highest-scoring project in each track receives Gold, then Silver, then Bronze. The Grand Champion is the highest-scoring project across all three tracks, and also keeps its track prize.

Ties are broken by the track's first-listed criterion, then by the judging panel chair.

Conflicts of interest: judges recuse themselves from any project involving a student they teach, mentor, or are related to.

Appeals: if you believe your project was misjudged or wrongly disqualified, email gibc.official.team@gmail.com within 72 hours of the announcement. Organizer decisions after review are final.

Prizes:

Grand Champion (1)

  • Featherless AI Grand Award: $300 USD in Featherless credits, awarded to the highest-scoring project across all three tracks.
  • Official Grand Winner certificate and recognition.

Gold, one per track (3)

  • Nord Security: 1-year subscriptions for NordVPN, NordPass and Incogni
  • Saily: 1 GB of free data for Saily
  • CodeCrafters: 1-year VIP membership.
  • Art of Problem Solving: $25 coupon for AoPS courses.
  • MeDo: 1-month MeDo membership, for projects built using MeDo.
  • Starbit: October 17th, Jcard Verify × TABEI
  • Cryptocurrency Flow Analysis Workshop - Basic Class
  • Adaptation Labs: $1000 credits
  • Official 1st Place certificate and global recognition.

Silver, one per track (3)

  • Nord Security: Nord1-year subscriptions for NordVPN, NordPass and Incogni
  • Saily: 1 GB of free data for Saily
  • CodeCrafters: 6-month VIP membership.
  • MeDo: 1-month MeDo membership, for projects built using MeDo.
  • Official 2nd Place certificate and recognition.

Bronze, one per track (3)

  • CodeCrafters: 3-month VIP membership.
  • MeDo: 1-month MeDo membership, for projects built using MeDo.
  • Official 3rd Place certificate and recognition.

All participants

  • Official Certificate of Participation and recognition.
  • Featherless AI: 1 month of free LLM inference access for the duration of the event.
  • Devswarm: 1 month of DevSwarm Pro (Coupon code in Starter Kit)
  • Interview Cake: free coding interview preparation course access.
  • .xyz Registry: 1 free .xyz domain per team, free for the first year, 150 available on a first come first served basis. Renewal after year one is paid at standard rates.
  • MeDo: 300 MeDo credits for every participant who registers on MeDo during the event.

All Participants who Sign up For adaption Labs

  • $700 credits on Adaption Labs (once you finish creating a account and filling out on the form posted in the Prizes section & ⚠️You can only claim this prize before september 29 ).

Redemption codes for sponsor perks are posted in the GIBC V2 Discord (Discord link on the Overview page). Using MeDo is optional and is not required to win any prize. Prizes are non-cash and sponsor perks are subject to each sponsor's own terms. We may substitute a prize of equal value if a sponsor offering changes.

Ownership and conduct

  • You own your work. Participants retain all intellectual property in their submissions. By submitting, you grant GIBC permission to display your project name, description, screenshots, and team names for the purpose of running and promoting the event.
  • Code of Conduct: all participants must follow the GIBC Code of Conduct at https://gibc-9eb4d.web.app/code-of-conduct.html
  • Harassment, plagiarism, or misrepresenting your work results in removal from the event.