DeepSeek vs. Llama: The "Kill The Cloud" Challenge
Stop paying for cloud APIs. Ideate the future of privacy-first, offline, on-device AI.
Overview
The era of renting intelligence is over. Why pay per token? Why wait for latency? Why hand your users' data to a massive corporation?
A pure ideathon backed by Y-Combinator founders (RunAnywhere, YC W26): participants architected mobile apps that run Small Language Models like DeepSeek R1, Llama 3, and Whisper entirely on-device. No internet. No fees. No spying.
- ▸Backed by YC founders
- ▸1,400+ registrants across Unstop and Devpost
- ▸Golden Ticket entries to the Global On-Device Hackathon
- ▸Judged by engineers from AWS and Wolters Kluwer
Who can enter
Open to everyone - students, professionals, indie developers, designers, founders, self-taught builders.
Results
1st
ClauseZero
led by Raghav Madan
Winner
2nd
Beli
Runner-Up
3rd
StackNova
led by Vishali
Second Runner-Up
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Stages & timeline
Stage 1
Round 1: Submission Round
15 Jan 2026, 4:46 pm → 20 Feb 2026, 12:44 pm
Stage 2■ finale
Round 2: Judging Round
8 Mar 2026, 6:00 pm → 9 Mar 2026, 12:08 am
Prizes
Winner
$75
Cash + Office Hours with YC Founders + Golden Ticket to the Global On-Device Hackathon
Runner-Up
$50
Cash + Office Hours with YC Founders
Second Runner-Up
$25
Cash
Judges & mentors
Ashif Anwar
Principal Engineer · Wolters Kluwer
Judge
Purvi Joshi
Leader · AWS
Judge
Aditya Batra
DevRel · RunAnywhere
Judge