CruzHacks 2023 a HUGE Success!
Article submitted by CruzHacks co-founder Mark Adams. Photos forthcoming.
Overview
An in-person event for the first time in two years, CruzHacks 2023 was a rousing success with 86 teams pitching their projects at the Stevenson Event Center. Familiar sights from before 2020 like mountains of energy drinks, piles of power strips and hackers typing away together all came back.
This year was dominated by the presence of ChatGPT, with speakers expounding its revolutionary capabilities and a flurry of coders integrating OpenAI into their projects. First time hackers made NATE, a MacOS native app to query ChatGPT, while others such as ReAInvent demonstrated the feasibility of transcribing Youtube videos, feeding them into a massive language model, and to create a chat interface to ask questions about the video’s contents.
UCSC’s Fall quarter brought a change to meal plans, with use-it-or-lose-it slug points replacing all-you-can-eat. Fresh in student’s minds, several projects tackled this new dining system from Slug Swap’s community driven approach to exchange Slug Points to trackers like “how many f*$&ing slug points should i have,” SlugBudget and SlugEats.
Judges from Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, Google and more reviewed projects from over 300 hackers.
Personal Connections to the event abounded from judges like Chandra Paladugula who drove his participating son from the Bay Area and then saw him accept an award on stage to former organizers Amit Saxena (CruzHacks 2018) and Mark Adams (Co-Founder HACK UCSC 2014) grouped together and commenting on the event.
Coming to New Tech
Shortlist of teams who have been invited to present at SCWorks New Tech on March 1. Keep an eye on our upcoming newsletters for more details.
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