Two undergraduate students in the Computer Engineering program at Insper took the podium at the first Llama Impact Hackathon: Brazil, a competition for artificial intelligence (AI) solutions held by the companies Meta and Cerebral Valley from the United States. With the project Edu.AI, the group formed by André Brito and Gabriel Valentim, from the eighth semester of the program, and Giovanna Moeller, from the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp), secured third place in the "Education and Culture" category, won a prize of $1,000, and will be able to submit their work to the Llama Impact Grant, the global stage of the event.

 

The trio developed the Edu.AI app, which aims to help Brazilian students prepare for the National High School Exam (ENEM). According to Valentim, the mission is to make education more accessible and provide direct support to students through technology. To achieve this, they use language models provided by Groq, a cloud service company and sponsor of the Hackathon, which awarded the cash prize. "The Top 3 and the Best on Groq prize highlight the relevance of the tools we build daily using cutting-edge technology," says Valentim.

 

Valentim is the co-founder of Nero.AI, a startup incubated at the Paulo Cunha Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub at Insper, where he works with six other students from the school who participated in the event (Samuel Cavalcanti, Hudson Araújo, Tales de Freitas, Gustavo Braga e Souza, Enzo Ribeiro da Silva, and André Pereira). He shares that he received the tip about the Hackathon from Laura Mattos, coordinator of technology and innovation at the Lemann Foundation. The theme was perfectly aligned with the proposal of Nero.AI. The seven team members were joined by André Brito — who had already worked on previous projects of the startup — and Giovanna Moeller — who was producing tech content and knew Brito via Instagram.

 

At the Hackathon, held in São Paulo on November 9 and 10, the nine students split into three groups, with one of them being awarded among the roughly 50 participating teams. The challenge was to develop, within 24 hours, a solution that utilized Meta's AI model, Llama.

 

Brito notes that the competing projects were very good and that after the presentations, the possibility of winning seemed even slimmer. "A few minutes before winning the prize, we told each other it was okay if we didn't win because we had managed to create something very cool together," says Brito. "The importance of this award is having the recognition from such a significant company like Meta, an international big tech that held an event in Brazil. The project is very interesting for its societal impact, assisting Brazilian students in preparing for Enem, especially those who, unfortunately, do not have access to quality education in the country."

 

From November 22 to 25, the group participated in the Llama Impact Hackathon Pan-LATAM, held online, making it to the six finalists with the CultAI project, a chatbot that allows exploring museum collections through mobile devices and the internet. This time, Brito, Giovanna, and Valentim were joined by André Santos, also from the eighth semester of Computer Engineering at Insper.