Meta launches global ten-day hackathon with access to new models and a million dollars in prizes

Meta announced a virtual, worldwide hackathon organized by its Superintelligence Lab. Registration is free and open to developers everywhere; participants will access the company’s latest models through the Meta Model API. Every registrant receives a $150 credit for API usage, and the total cash prize pool stands at a million dollars. Registration has not yet opened; Meta is inviting interested developers to sign up for notifications.

The Meta Model API is the gateway to the new models, but the company has disclosed nothing beyond the name. No model names, versions or benchmarks have been published, making it impossible to gauge how they stack up against rivals. Meta also hasn’t said whether access covers language models only or includes multimodal systems. Developers are effectively signing up on a promise.

Ten days is a tight window for a hackathon of this scale, pointing toward focused prototypes rather than long-term projects. The prize breakdown remains undisclosed — no word on how many teams will win, the top-prize amount, or the judging criteria. The $150 per-person credit is meant to cover inference costs during the event, though it’s unclear whether that suffices for intensive experimentation with large models.

The move arrives as Meta doubles down on its open-source and open-weights strategy against closed competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. A free, global hackathon doubles as a developer-recruitment drive and a load test dressed up as a competition. With no start date, no model specifications and no transparency around judging, the substance is still mostly hype.