University AI Competitions: Year One Results

What we learned from running AI builder competitions at 12 universities and how it shaped our hiring pipeline.

We ran AI agent building competitions at 12 universities across 4 countries. Teams of students had 48 hours to build an AI agent that could complete a set of real-world tasks using our open-source tools.

Results: - 340 students participated across all events - Top teams built agents that outperformed our internal baselines - 8 competition participants joined our team as researchers or engineers - 3 winning projects were integrated into our open-source toolkit

The competitions proved that practical AI agent building skills are best developed through hands-on challenges, not lectures.