Julian Mack

Member of Technical Staff at Cohere working on multimodal LLMs and audio, and a Cohere Labs contributor to Cohere Transcribe, Cohere’s open-source automatic speech recognition model.

Hackathon Caps Models at 32B Parameters to Reward Tinkerable AI Apps

Build Small is a Hugging Face and Gradio hackathon organized around a hard constraint: every model used must be under 32 billion parameters. Yuvraj Sharma framed the rule as a way to move AI building away from dependence on giant hosted models and back toward systems that participants can inspect, fine-tune, run locally, and ship as working Gradio Spaces. Sponsor presentations from Black Forest Labs, OpenBMB, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Modal, JetBrains, and Cohere largely reinforced that premise, offering small models, credits, tools, and prize categories meant to turn the constraint into runnable projects rather than demos in name only.

Hugging FaceJun 5, 202620 min read