What would make you actually fly to Finland for a 72-hour AI hackathon?

We’ve been building a student-led AI hackathon in Finland for the past year, and it has somehow grown much bigger than we originally expected. This November, 1,000+ builders from around the world are coming to Turku for 72 hours. The setup: €50,000 prize pool 15 real challenges from companies and public organizations 100+ partners & supporters across AI, research, startups and industry Google Web AI Lead Jason Mayes is flying in from San Francisco to speak and mentor builders in person participation + food are free strongest teams can continue for another 8 weeks toward pilots, commercialization and potentially new companies Some of the organizations involved include Google for Developers, ElevenLabs, LUMI AI Factory, Bayer, Sandvik, Valmet, Elisa, Meyer Turku and others. But the thing we care about most is that this doesn’t feel like another hackathon where everyone builds a demo on Sunday and forgets about it on Monday. We want people to meet exceptional builders, work on something real, and potentially keep building afterwards. Also: you absolutely do not need to be an ML engineer. We need product people, designers, researchers, scientists, business people, lawyers, health people, etc. too. I’m one of the people organizing it, so happy to answer basically anything about the event here. And genuinely curious: what would make a hackathon worth travelling internationally for you? If you want to check it out: sinceai.ai Turku, Finland — Nov 6–8, 2026.