Yardwork: The Coolest AI Hackathon Ever
Launch Yard and our good friend Arav are throwing the coolest ai hackathon ever in Cambridge.
One rule: Only cool ideas.
We will ensure this by approving ideas as sufficiently awesome the day of the hackathon, before they are allowed to start hacking.
Tracks:
AI for Scientific Discovery
With Google’s recent launch of Co-Scientist, having LLMs successfully develop potential cures for leukemia and liver disease, it’s become clear just how impactful LLMs can be when it comes to new scientific discovery. For this track, you should push scientific frontiers with LLMs. Basically, get LLMs to do some cool science.
AI, Stablecoins, and the future of Money
Last year, global stablecoin settlement exceeded $7 trillion compared to $14 trillion settled via Visa and Mastercard. After Stripe’s acquisition of a relatively new stablecoin company for $1B+, stablecoins have been exploding as a field ripe for innovation. Finance is old, slow, and broken. Visa is written in COBOL and it’s codebase hasn’t changed since 1970. This industry is ripe for the taking. For this track, mix intelligence too cheap to meter with borderline-free transactions and DeFi and see what old industries you can shake up.
AI in Cybersecurity
LLMs have gotten significantly more unhinged, with the Grok 3 series of models pushing the limits of what LLMs can be used for. As open-source models get their guardrails smashed, there's more room for both good and bad actors to manipulate LLMs for cyberattacks/defense. For this track, get an LLM to hack stuff. Scary, but useful.
AI in AR/BCI/Hardware
Meta's Orion glasses have made waves throughout the headlines. Some people even bought Vision Pros. AR is becoming the next big platform. Meta has also recently released an EEG-to-text model, proving that BCI can be done in different ways. Build on these platforms or build some cool robots or something. For this track, just build something cool with hardware.
Agents Track
Any other cool AI agent hack also goes! There is still a lot of alpha left on the table with agents, and with the recent traction of MCPs, there's an infinite number of topics here. If none of the previous tracks interest you, try this one out!
General Track
Some other cool AI project you want to make but doesn't fit into any of these tracks? You can still do it!