🇺🇸 Hack on ARC Prize or Fine-tune Deep Seek: Strong Compute + GPUs included
​Previous winners and grantees:
​Deep Seek Fine Tuning: Hackathon: Increase PyTorch -> CUDA translation from 10%->30% accuracy
​ARC Prize: Grantee placed Second Place in ARC Prize contest
​Chess Bots: Train From Scratch: reached 2000 ELO in 10 hours.
​STRONG COMPUTE GPU HACKATHON
​For Engineers, AI Researchers, students & anyone who is comfortable with PyTorch.
​Our goal is to offer the best platform to build and train models at cluster scale. Come on over, light up some clusters, have a blast and let us know what you love and what needs work.
​Strong Compute’s Instant Super Computer (ISC) is designed to be the easiest way to get started on multinode training. You’ll be up and running in an hour.
​Engineers only. All code. Recruiters/Slidegineers/Marketers etc. need not apply.
​All applicants will be vetted for technical fit before being approved to attend.
​Choose from one of the following hacks to compete in over the weekend:
​Competition A: ARC Prize Challenge
​Winner will earn compute on Strong Compute through our research program to work on the 2025 ARC Prize*
​Join a curated, interview-only hackathon alongside top AI researchers, engineers, and developers to tackle the ARC Prize.
​The ARC Prize is a $1M public competition to beat and open source a solution to the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark—learn more here. ARC-AGI-2, launched in March 2025, sets a new standard for AI reasoning: every task is solvable by humans in under two tries, yet unsolved by any frontier AI system.
​Last year, we supported a project that went on to place 2nd in the 2024 ARC Prize. This year, Strong Compute is proud to return as a Foundation Partner — backing more open-source efforts pushing the frontier of machine reasoning.
​Join us over a weekend at our hacker house. We’ll bring the GPUs, food, drinks, desks, and vibes — you bring your laptop and your ideas.
​Details:
​Challenge: Build a research-driven, technically promising solution to the ARC Prize challenge.
​Resources: Past ARC benchmark tasks, evaluation methods, open research papers, and dev environment.
​Compute: Dedicated GPU access via Strong Compute’s ISC.
​Judging: Evaluation of research rigor, novelty, and model performance against ARC-AGI benchmark.
​Competition B: Deep Seek Fine-Tuning
​DeepSeek has landed. Come build the next demonstration of leaner, meaner reasoning models dominating the big guys.
​Strong Compute will provide the DeepSeek distillation model weights at your fingertips, and a bunch of GPUs to fine-tune on. Over to you!
​Fine-tune a DeepSeek reasoning model on your dataset and show us what it can do. The most impressive demo wins.
​Details:
​Challenge: Fine-tune a DeepSeek model on your dataset.
​Resources: Pre-downloaded DeepSeek model variants and a demonstration of how to fine-tune on Strong Compute.
​DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B
​DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B
​DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B
​DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B
​DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B
​DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B
​Compute: Dedicated GPU access via Strong Compute’s ISC.
​Judging: Qualitative assessment of what your fine-tuned model can do that the stock model can’t.
​💰 Prize
​$2.5K–$25K Open Source Research Compute Grant* for each competition. 1 Prize for ARC and 1 Prize for Deep Seek.
​📍 Location
​San Francisco, USA – Venue details will be shared upon successful application.
​Address: West Portal, SF
​🗓️ Event Schedule
​Friday
​6:00 pm: Arrive. Drinks, snacks + networking
​7:00 pm: Set-up, onboarding, test training run + inference
​7:30 pm: Competition beginsÂ
​8:30 pm: Dinner
​Late: Hacking
​Saturday
​9:00 am: Day two start, breakfast
​1:00 pm: Lunch
​4:30 pm: Draft submissionsÂ
​5:45 pm: Final submissionsÂ
​6:00 pm: Dinner + Presentations
​8:30 pm: Wrap up
​Strong Compute
​Strong Compute provides infrastructure management capability for rapid artificial intelligence development.
​P.S. We’re hiring. This is a great way for us to get to know each other. Open roles: https://jobs.lever.co/strongcomputeÂ
​Community Partner:
​Build Club – The home for top AI engineers in APAC.
​*Winners must finalize an acceptable research proposal within 30 days after the event to be eligible for compute grants. Refer to our research grant requirements.