Qai x Hugging Face Hackathon
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| Figure 1: Hugging Face mentors for the hackathon |
“Oh and by the way, this is the first hackathon in the GCC region by Hugging Face”, said Serge, while signing off from the call where we (Sayak, Niels, Younes and I) were in to brainstorm on the hackathon with Qai.
Doha was witness to a great hackathon from November 5th through 7th 2026, collaboration between Hugging Face and Qai. The theme for 45 teams was pretty simple, figure out a problem in Qatar, use Hugging Face ecosystem, and provide a solution.
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| Figure 2: Participants in the hackathon |
There were 500+ applications, where we filtered 150 participants and then put them into 40 teams for the actual event. From the 40 submissions, we selected 15 and then selected the top 3.
The top 15 finalists: https://huggingface.co/collections/qai-hackathon/finalists-list-of-15
The top 3 submissions: https://huggingface.co/collections/qai-hackathon/top-3-winners
What good would it do if we (Hugging Face) were present and did not try educating the participants about the suite of products we have. We took three sessions:
- Aritra and Younes: What is Hugging Face?
- Sayak: Image and Video Generation with 🤗 Diffusers
- Niels: Getting started with Local AI
We hope to see this going forward and to be part of more AI builders from the GCC region.