A trio of builders won a generative AI hackathon within five hours of learning about Cohere Rerank. The endpoint is based on a neural reranking technique that, with just a few lines of code, provides a powerful semantic boost to any keyword or vector search system. It enhances search precision and improves accuracy while keeping fast response times when implemented. Rerank endpoint, available exclusively to hackathon participants through a private beta, enabled the winning team to integrate semantic search into their application seamlessly.

The AI Tinkerers Summer Hackathon on June 10th was organized by AI Tinkerers, a global community of AI experts, and Madrona Ventures, a venture firm with a long history of supporting AI and innovation. Cohere’s co-founder Ivan Zhang attended the hackathon and surprised participants with exclusive access to the private beta version of Rerank, in addition to partnering as a hackathon sponsor.

The winning team, Reza Salehi, Ramsey Khadder, and Pratik Prakash, formed around the idea of information access. They shared the frustrating experience of navigating incomplete internal documentation and searching through Slack support channels to find answers to their technical questions.

To solve this problem, the trio developed Sherlock AI, a Discord bot that leverages the company's code documentation and support threads to provide quicker answers to employees’ questions. Rerank's remarkable simplicity and power enabled the team to deliver a fully functional demo within the timeframe of the weekend hackathon. They highlighted that implementing document retrieval with a vector database could have taken hours of their time, but with the help of Rerank, this task was effortlessly completed within minutes.

Sherlock AI offers benefits to companies of all sizes. Large companies have numerous, well-documented internal frameworks and libraries. Small companies and startups often rely on open-source projects that lack comprehensive documentation, resulting in employees turning to support channels for answers. In both cases, it is time-consuming for employees to search through all the available information to find what they need. Thanks to Cohere Rerank, Sherlock AI will help them find answers to their questions faster, more accurately, and more efficiently.

As first-place winners, the Sherlock AI team received a range of prizes, including cloud credits from event sponsors, $5k worth of Cohere credits, and an invitation to a VIP dinner sponsored by Microsoft Startups. Additionally, all participants received a limited edition community swag.

We’d like to extend our heartfelt congratulations to the winning teams and thank everyone who participated in this awesome event. We hope you had fun, and we can’t wait to see what you build next with Cohere!