Newsletter – July 6, 2023

Berkeley SkyDeck and Cal Hacks recently co-hosted the UC Berkeley AI Hackathon, the largest Generative AI LLM hackathon ever, which brought 1,200 hackers from around the world to the Berkeley campus for an intense 36 hours. Four startups, Metropolis, CureGenie, Prosper AI, and ALIGNED, won the Grand Prize, which included a $50K investment each from the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund. Their creations included NPCs for immersive games, a financial adviser for Gen Z, and more. For many, the Hackathon provided the first hands-on exposure to the GPT-4 APIs, with participants ranging from computer science PhDs to humanities undergraduates just beginning their coding journey. Chon Tang (Founding Partner, Berkeley SkyDeck Fund) predicts that many of SkyDeck’s future founders will utilize LLMs disruptively and that some of the teams from the Hackathon will ultimately join SkyDeck, “ready to continue their venture journey by creating a moonshot that changes the world.” Read more of Tang’s take on the “Woodstock of AI” and what comes next here!