Written by Linda Splitt and Oliver Guhr.
Although digital exchange has become an integral part of our everyday lives (and of course also offers some advantages), one thing remains clear: personal encounters create depth, trust and genuine collaboration. At the third official hackathon of the KI-Netzwerk Dresden, which we organised together with Impact Labs, we were able to experience exactly that: an exciting and inspiring mix of technology, team spirit and drive around the topic of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence does not work without human interaction
Artificial intelligence is no longer a niche topic: it is penetrating industries, changing working methods and raising many questions at the same time. For both opportunities and critical reflection, we need spaces in which we can exchange ideas informally and at eye level.
This is why the KI-Netzwerk Dresden was founded in 2023. The growing community, which is now also active beyond the city limits, offers a wide range of opportunities for practical discussions, project ideas and collaborations. It strengthens the business location, pools expertise and helps players to position themselves more effectively in the AI cosmos.
At Cloud&Heat, we also believe that everything works better (and is more fun) together, which is why we are not only pleased about the positive development of the AI network, but are also passionate about getting involved. On the one hand, we place our core topics of digital sovereignty and energy efficiency in the context of AI and, on the other hand, we provide support with technical infrastructure, premises, event organisation and speakers - and the most recent hackathon once again provided a great opportunity for this.
Own your AI: The community is back at Cloud&Heat for Hackathon #3
- Teuken-7B - Daniel Steinigen, Research Engineer at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, introduced us to Teuken-7B - an open-source language model that has been trained with content from 24 languages
- DISQU - Co-founder Anastasia Vöhringer gave us an overview of the importance of digital sovereignty with regard to AI and different LLMs
- Impact Labs - Co-founder Oliver Guhr presented a use case involving the construction of a call centre agent on an open source basis
On day 2, we invited the community to the Cloud&Heat rooms. This was where we got down to practical implementation: participants were able to bring their own use cases or join other projects. We were particularly pleased with the openness of the working groups, in which everyone found their place regardless of their specialist background. This led to results from very different contexts - from drug safety to pizza delivery services.
Focus project: BürgerBot 24
A highlight of the hackathon: the non-profit project BürgerBot24which was realised in cooperation with Office24 was created as a data partner. The (quite ambitious) goal was to develop an AI assistant to support citizens with questions relating to administration and authorities - and we were actually able to develop a first executable version!
To provide a powerful LLM server, we opted for a virtual machine with 4 GPUs connected via NVSwitch with a total of 128 GB VRAM in our data centre in Frankfurt. We installed Ollama with different AI models on this machine and provided the participants with the appropriate API from our office guest network - a setup that enabled efficient work.
The result after just one day of intensive work is impressive: BürgerBot24 is already able to answer 80% of all enquiries correctly. A fantastic success that demonstrates the enormous potential of this technology for the public sector and lays an excellent foundation for further development.
Conclusion: Community, a wealth of ideas and great results
The hackathon was more than just an AI event - it was an open exchange, mutual support, clever ideas, good humour and a strong sense of togetherness. The participants contributed their knowledge, there was support, laughter, experimentation - and solutions were found that would probably have taken much longer on their own. We would like to thank the partners, participants and the KI-Netzwerk Dresden for a great day and are already looking forward to the next one!
