AI themed hackathon at Kaleidos (makers of Penpot & Taiga)

Design Lounge
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Hey! It’s a bit late over here but I wanted to share something cool happening at Kaleidos the week of the 17th of April. We will have an off-season PIWEEK. We have been running these piweeks for 12 years in a row, every six months. Taiga and Penpot were born in such piweeks.

From an email I wrote to the company last week

From the many uses of Generative AI, there’s one field of enormous potential and that is “productivity boost”. Perhaps you’re in need of inspiration or you want to accelerate menial or repetitive tasks. Sometimes you just need to overcome information overload. Whatever your need, you will probably want to stay in control but “outsource” some of the work to a tireless algorithm.

As an open source product company that builds product team tools, we can’t simply wait to see what happens, we need to make sure we own this new tech track. We need to train ourselves to have the right perspective and rigour. This of course also includes any ethical considerations. Not all Generative AI approaches will be positive for society the same way not all technology is.

So, this is happening in less than two months and we will be sharing whatever we come up with. Typically a PIWEEK hosts 10-12 different projects but this one could be a bit different.

We’re not short of ideas but I’m posting this message here in case someone would want to suggest a particular approach or technology. It doesn’t need to be related to Taiga or Penpot, of course.

At Kaleidos we have the feeling that is generative AI is going superfast and it’s kind of noisy. We do have hands-on experience on machine-learning/deep-learning projects and yet we know we want to pause a bit and focus on leveling up the whole company. Everything we do is open source so any help towards our efforts will be released publicly, whether it’s a white paper or a tech POC.

Contrary to our normal PIWEEKs this one is not really meant to invite other people to join, simply because we will try to streamline the whole brainstorming+marketplace+piweek+demo cycle and it’s not going to be super inclusive.

Now, after this AI PIWEEK or AIWEEK or whatever we call it, we’d love to share our findings with the broader OSD community.

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Before reading - i just thought you create “hackathons” for creating off-ideas and for generate apps with AI) Also generative-AI can generate ideas)) Full circle of production - I mean AI can use these products)))

To be serious: thanks for sharing, as you say it is great way for many reasons.

In my case for example i interested in it just for experience - teamwork, soft-skills. I for example participate on the platform for hackhathons(devpost), maybe it is very inclusive but everyone can participate…

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Two things that I often find interesting is:

  • How language models can provide you with several ideas about how to approach a topic (similar to what one would do when searching for templates for mails, documents on the web) – basically a scaffold-like use.
  • language learning or giving some reassurance on how to write is a frequent current use that is removed from the “replacing people” ideas around AI. Basically, one is unsure how to translate or phrase something and pokes google translate or deepl for its take.
  • While it is not a fancy AI topic per se, I like context-free grammars for generating texts or images, similarly for creative inspiration or generative art (see “tiny gallery” or “soft landscapes”; I also wonder if townscaper uses something like this. Would be curious about a not-useful but fun cenerative grammar for UIs!)
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Thank you for your sharing. Where can we find the findings that have been shared with the broader OSD community?