GPT-3 Hackathon: Demonstrating The Value of Emerging Technology

As part of its mission to connect enterprises with startups and emerging technologies, Maxitech hosted the Softtech GPT-3 Hackathon from February 12th to 14th. This event, the first to feature GPT-3 from OpenAI in Turkey, introduced the technology to Softtech, Turkey’s leading tech company.

Created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. OpenAI is a San Francisco-based and founded company by Elon Musk, Sam Altman (the founder of Y-Combinator), and others, who collectively pledged $1 billion. Elon Musk stepped down from the board in 2018 but remains a donor. And in 2019, OpenAI LP received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.

Maxitech identified GPT-3 as a technology that would interest Softtech as a partner, in addition to using the technology in its own software products. With Maxitech’s leadership and established Silicon Valley connections they secured meetings with OpenAI to discuss hackathon opportunities and access to the platform.

During meetings with OpenAI, Maxitech realized that a hackathon would be an effective way to build awareness and interest in GPT-3 among Softtech executives and developers. In addition to facilitating the hackathon, Maxitech:

• Worked with OpenAI to secure scarce licenses
• Provided the hackathon teams with technical support
• Reviewed early versions of the teams’ applications.

By hosting an internal hackathon for Softtech instead of a public one, Maxitech saw a way to provide Softtech a first-adopter advantage over its competitors in this groundbreaking technology.

Creating Innovative Solutions With GPT-3

The remote three-day hackathon included ten teams of three developers from Softtech,each of which was challenged to create a winning solution based around the GPT-3 technology.

Melih Murat Ertem, General Manager, Softtech, kicked off the hackathon on Friday, February 12th with a welcome speech. Afterwards, Maxitech presented the technical documentation to get the teams up and running. On Saturday and Sunday, the teams worked on their applications, with judging held on Monday. Judges included executives from Softtech China, Maxitech, Vela Partners, and OpenAI.

Winning Solutions

Awards were given to the top three teams, those whose applications were judged the most marketable.

• 1st Place: An application for sentiment analysis in social media to influence trading in Fintech applications and inform users about possible actions to take.
• 2nd Place: A use case capable of creating customized messages (text or voice) for users. This enables a new level of personalization in communications, allowing users to create new audio/text based on inputted emotions and send these to each other.
• 3rd Place: An app that simplifies travel by creating an itinerary, including recommendations and warnings.

Executives from the participating organizations, as well as the judge from OpenAI, were impressed with the variety of use cases and the quality of the solutions presented by the Softtech teams.

What’s Next

As a supporter of OpenAI, Softtech and Maxitech will continue to help GPT-3 and the expansion of Turkish language translation to serve Turkish populations in Turkey and throughout the world. Maxitech and Softtech are committed to supporting OpenAI and their groundbreaking technology.