After taking place in San Francisco, the OpenEnv AI Hackathon is now set to arrive in India. Organised by Scaler School of Technology in collaboration with Meta, Hugging Face, and PyTorch, this national-level event offers developers a unique chance to work on the same infrastructure used to train next-generation AI systems.
The hackathon centres around OpenEnv, an open-source framework designed to build reinforcement learning environments. These environments enable AI agents to learn by interacting with dynamic, real-world scenarios instead of relying on static datasets. Participants will use OpenEnv to develop environments that contribute to the global open-source ecosystem.
Unlike traditional hackathons that focus on short demonstrations, this event emphasises building real, usable infrastructure. The most promising projects will be reviewed by the Meta team during the final round at the Scaler School of Technology campus in Bangalore.
Top-performing teams will compete for $30,000 in prizes and gain the opportunity to interview with AI teams at Meta and Hugging Face. Their work in the hackathon will effectively act as part of their application. The competition will take place in multiple stages, starting with an online round and concluding with a 48-hour in-person finale in Bangalore. During the finale, participants will collaborate with top teams and engage with engineers working on advanced AI systems.
To make the event accessible to a wider audience, organisers will offer free preparatory training modules. These resources will help participants, even those with little or no experience in reinforcement learning, prepare before the competition begins. The hackathon is expected to attract more than 70,000 developers, making it one of the largest AI-focused events ever held in India.
For India’s developer community, the OpenEnv hackathon represents an important shift. Access to advanced AI infrastructure, especially reinforcement learning environments used to train autonomous agents, has traditionally been limited to a few research labs and tech hubs.
Bringing this initiative to India allows thousands of developers to work directly with such systems, contribute to the growing open-source ecosystem, and have their work assessed by engineers building the next generation of AI.
Registrations are currently open. The competition will begin in late March and conclude with the Bangalore finale at the end of April. Developers can register online.