SOTA-AI December Contest

Overview

This hackathon challenges students to build real AI systems by engineering models and owning the entire pipeline, from architecture design to training and deployment. Unlike other events, this focuses on deep technical skills across classical machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. It's a Kaggle-style competition designed to test your mastery of AI fundamentals.

Requirements

Participants must be students aged 13 or older and located in any country except those with standard exceptions. This competition uses Kaggle for its core tasks. To join, you must first join the SOTA-AI Discord server where a secret invite link to the Kaggle competition will be released on December 9, 2025. The Kaggle competition, including datasets and problem statements for three tracks (Classical ML, NLP, CV), will launch on the same day. The competition runs from December 9, 2025, to January 8, 2026, with a submission deadline on Kaggle and Devpost by January 8, 2026. Your Devpost submission must include a link to a well-commented, private Kaggle Notebook explaining your model choices, loss functions, and preprocessing techniques. Open notebooks are highly prioritized.

Prizes

This contest offers over $4,580 in prizes. There are multiple prize categories including AoPS coupons (4 winners), InterviewCake licenses (50 winners), one-year .xyz domains (60 winners), and Codecrafters.io VIP subscriptions (3 winners). All participants also receive an extended 30-day trial for Balsamiq. Specific cash amounts for top places are not detailed but the total prize pool is substantial.