Foundational AI — March 14–16, 2025 at UC Santa Cruz in California

Genius DevCamp 2025 Participants

Congratulations to everyone who participated in Genius DevCamp — the launch of a brand new platform for foundational AI that performs experiments. Dozens of engineers, designers and entrepreneurs gathered at UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Extension in Santa Clara, CA from March 14–16, 2025 and showed what causal reinforcement learning can do.

We had an amazing weekend:

hours of cooperation

demonstrations

winning teams

This is how we get the best results and have become the most successful hackathon in the world. Our 18-year tradition is going strong and this year we had the greatest ratio of participants-to-demonstrations ever for an event: 2:1.

It’s who we are and how we work together that matters. The results speak for themselves.

Special Guests

Sheila Lirio Marcelo

Ohai

Shelia Lirio Marcelo with Kevin Yang and Adam Reilly from Ohai.ai

Founder of Care.com and recent Inc Magazine Female Founder 500 Honoree Sheila Lirio Marcelo flew in with her team (Kevin Yang and Adam Reilly) to present her “second act” in support of busy parents: Ohai.ai. It’s an AI assistant that helps parents (and anyone) manage the cognitive load related to scheduling, coordinating and remembering all of life’s details.

She issued a challenge to the community, and asked for help with a particularly difficult aspect of data management for her AI system. It was inspiring to hear her story and witness the cusp of a new launch.

Chuchu Wang

chuchuwithlove

Chuchu Wang closing our event with a guided meditation

Executive Coach and brilliant speaker Chuchu Wang also flew in for our event, to help ground us in mindfulness and guide us towards to connection as we built teams and projects over the weekend. She began the event with a visualization, helping us to imagine how success might feel.

Then just prior to the awards ceremony she revisited that moment and kept us focused on gratitude and community, with another wonderful blessing that left us all speechless.

The results were astounding:

The Champions

Best New Developer

SportsTube

Enzo Roa and his father Humberto

The headline for our event was 15-year-old Enzo Roa using reinforcement learning technology to build an instant recommendation system for sports videos.

It was astonishing.

All by himself, using HTML for the first time and some basic instruction from the mentors (including his father), Enzo absolutely crushed it with a working demo and a flawless presentation. With just a few clicks, any user of his system will get better recommendations than you would find on YouTube.

You could use this to transform your own YouTube experience—amazing work for just one weekend!

Future of Truth

Boolean Value

Dan Zeitman

When I asked Dan to attend yet another Developer Camp event, he had an idea immediately: solve social media.

One step in that direction is to reduce the impact of misinformation on certain platforms. Dan chose to create a browser plugin that detects misinformation and presents the user with a Fact Check button instead of a Share button.

This solution prevents people from quickly spreading bad information—and also stops platforms from immediately benefitting from viral shares of inflammatory speech.

Deeply moral.

Ethical Future

Ethical AI

Yan Zhu

When Yan arrived at the event, she quickly admitted that she’s not a coder—and then immediately got into a deep discussion with the best developers in the room about the ethics of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Throughout the weekend, she worked to develop a framework to use the new platform to do something that has not been done before: a learning loop that trains and optimizes any LLM to behave in responsible and aligned ways.

Hustle Award

Edenext

Remi Nicolas

When visiting SVVR, we met Remi who had just moved to California after life spent on the islands doing conservation work and construction. In the true spirit of Developer Camp, he taught himself as much as he could learn in 48 hours. He pitched a startup that engages stakeholders in nature conservancy as part of a construction project planning workflow.

At every event there is someone who embodies the principles of entrepreneurship, perhaps in a way that might not be recognized at a traditional hackathon. We are honored to share the spotlight, the way Remi shared his precious ideas.

We are all better together.

Better Health

VitalXR

Jack Chin and Triet Ngo

A huge component of healthy living is making well-informed food choices. When the VitalXR team pivoted from XR into the use of reinforcement learning, they kept the name because the reality is that healthy habits are vital.

When the VitalXR team started applying the new platform to this problem, their system learned from the user’s habits to create a personalized meal program for them — with just a few data points. It was extremely accurate, and a great demonstration of the power of this new platform.

Smarter systems mean smarter societies.

Genius Award

CyberOrganism

Brandt Weary and Brandon Rutter-Daywater

There was clearly one team that made the most of the new platform during our event. They built a minimalist interface for a task management system that actually worked.

They used the platform to create a new kind of AI-powered mindmap system. Instead of just being a hierarchical todo list, the AI would organize all of your documents and notes around your project outline — If you were working within a particular part of your project list / outline the AI would bring to bear the most relevant information for that sub-topic and learn to be optimally helpful in realtime, on the fly.

These two epitomize the word genius, as they used the platform to augment their own brains—and made something that they need to see in the world.

Never stop.

Future of Work

Brave Potential

David Yu Chen

As a former Google, life/relationship coach, and now as an entrepreneur, David knew he was building something to help others. This time addressing the problem that AI will transform the job market and ask large numbers of people to find new uses for their skills. He built a system that surveys users on the types of work they’ve done, adapts to them in realtime, and helps them find skills that they have that can lead to new paths they could pursue.

From the beginning we’ve known that job finding and skills matching was a potentially great use case for the platform. David’s work proved that—and we want to see him succeed.

Ship it!

Rookie of the Year

NotValve AND Pokemon4Ever

The Incomparable Elias Roa

Following up on his success with Best Game at our prior event, Elias spent his college Spring Break blowing minds once again.

Going first during our Idea Showcase is never easy. He fought through the initial difficulties with our A/V system with grace, patience and fortitude. He presented his idea as a problem he wanted to solve for himself — a better way to browse and buy STEAM games. The result was an online store for exploring new video games that seems a lot better than anything out there! Maybe this platform will be a nice way for him to pay for college!

But THEN he was tapped to go second—and didn’t skip a beat. Continuing with the theme of Fun and Games, he presented a Pokemon card recommendation system. Each solution perfectly leveraged the strength of the platform and showed us all how quickly a single person can solve their own challenges to make things a lot more fun.

Super fun!

Honorable Mention

OrangeCones

Matt Fisher

We had to rank the top three ideas overall, but it was a tough choice. Matt used machine learning to decipher and categorize building and inspection codes in California, so that anyone can understand what to do when buying or improving their home.

We all wanted to have this app, and it was impressive and honorable to see him build it all himself.

Make it so, Matt!

Runner Up

Gigos

Brian Gallagher and Mitchell Curtis

One of the great challenges when using AI is that blank prompt. In fact there is an entire industry of “prompt engineering” that teaches people how to speak to the system.

ACTAI adventurer Brian Gallagher and his teammate Mitchel Curtis did us all proud by entering the room with an open mind and a generous spirit—and pivoting their idea into a brilliant solution for the common AI user.

This team thought through that challenge from both sides and came up with something truly unique: using the new platform to help a user immediately navigate through a huge selection of possible prompts to provide suggestions within their interests and areas of curiosity.

Keep it up, team!

Best in Show

Pocketflow

Helena Zhang

This team is that they worked across time zones, having just learned about our event on the day of the competition! Working out of their Stanford dorm rooms, they developed their system called Pocketflow. They demonstrated its ability to convert prompts into UI/UX workflows,by generating an email lead generation workflow on the spot based on call-outs from members of our audience. A compelling vision.

The Ohai team had laid down a challenge — use AI to convert screenshots of emails into properly formatted calendar events. PocketFlow used ChatGPT to break this challenge into a step by step process workflow data structure, and then automatically called DALL-E within that flow to convert an email screenshot into a calendar event.

We were impressed by their youthful energy, entrepreneurship, and demo skills. If more teams are putting together solutions out of their dorm rooms and labs, we want to give them a hand.

Bravo!

Grand Prize

Most Helpful

Jamie Lovett

Grand Champion Jamie Lovett of Product Genius

Behind every group at this event was one person making it all come together. From the documentation to the applications to the API itself, Product Genius teammate Jamie Lovett is a man of all trades.

He was at every table, multiple times. He was on the mic. He was behind the scenes before, during and afterwards. Listening. Learning. Helping. Improving everyone’s work.

Each year we honor the values of open source in our community by giving the Grand Prize to the person who helps the most people during the event. This time it was Jamie, by a landslide.

He was awarded a handcrafted statue of a fisherman from El Nido, Palawan in the Philippines. It is representative of the adage, “Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

Thank you, my friend. This would not have happened without you!

Judges

This time we took a different approach to judging the ideas and pitches that participants created. Normally, we include representatives from our sponsors to help—but this time we included members of our investor community.

Developer Camp formed in 2007, the week that iPhone launched to the public. It was the result of a six person founding team, and rooted in many traditions such as BarCamp, MacHack and SuperHappyDevHouse.

For me the impetus came from a hackathon at Odeo the year prior to that—when Twitter was created. Watching and cheering us on was Bill Tai, an investor in Odeo at the time. He was a backer of Twitter from the start, and a patient believer in my hackathon endeavors ever since.

Skip ahead 18 years to Genius DevCamp and Bill (who has made some brilliant bets since then—like Wish, Zoom, Canva and Color) volunteered to be our VC judge. This way he was able to give direct feedback to the participants and take part in the tradition himself.

Thank you, Bill!

Joining him was his cofounder at ACTAI Ventures, Amanda Terry, and prominent member of the ACTAI Global community Brian Baumann of the NYSE.

Each event has a theme, and this year’s theme is Foundational AI. I had the honor of presenting on this theme at the recent ACTAI Asia Pacific AI Tech Competition in the Philippines, and invited that community to join us for Genius DevCamp. Many of them joined, and so it’s no surprise that our event had a similar vibe:

Judges plus members of ACTAI Global

Shoutout to Eric Nghiem of The Cash Flow Doctor, who flew in to support the group in person and offer his expertise to young startups. In typical fashion he brought his “A” game and had fun in the process, sending this:

Eric Nghiem’s South Park version of Developer Camp

Special thanks to my friend Ben Vigoda for creating the technology that allowed our contestants to be successful this past weekend. We’ve been collaborators for decades, in music and in life, but it was unique to see how powerful his Product Genius team could be when driven to help the community.

Ben Vigoda of Product Genius on the banjo with Dom Sagolla on the concertina

Ben thanking his Product Genius team and contributors

Genius DevCamp Winners