Howdy, CompactAI-O is launching a tiny Model Golf, and the winner walks away with $50 in RunPod credits. Monthly. Every month. Show up, build, somebody wins.
What it is
Build the best language model you can under 100 million parameters, with at least a 1028-token context window. That's it. Any architecture, any tokenizer, any training scheme you can dream up at 3am. The only catch is it's gotta be open source (MIT, GPL, Apache, AGPL) take your pick.
It scratches the same itch as a Kaggle comp without the dataset\leaderboard nonsense. No fixed benchmark to game. No llama.cpp compatibility hoops. If you wanna train a 50M-param MoE with five experts and a tokenizer built on cookbooks, you can do that. Nothing stopping you.
The rules are listed in the discord and on the organization page if you're interested.
Why $50????
It's symbolic. It ain't gonna make anyone rich. But it's enough to cover a weekend of GPU time, enough to keep enthusiasts coming back, and not so much that it pulls in people who are just there for the money. Enthusiasts build interesting things. Interesting things move the field forward. A little incentive. I'd do it for $50 lol.
Just published: how we built production Sango (Central African Republic) translation without fine-tuning, parallel corpus, or training compute.
The method — vocabulary-augmented prompting with a 581-entry native-speaker-verified lexicon — generalizes to any of the ~2,000 African languages at the same data-poverty level. Recipe, dataset, and code template all included.
@retrain-pipelines v0.2.0 is out ! I'm at Station F at My booth with GOSIM Paris 2026 today & tomorrow. Come meet me for a live in-person demo and a chat !