In late 2024, I signed up for the Gemma 2 AI Challenge, a hackathon event co-hosted by lablab.ai and Google London.
This three-day hybrid hackathon brought together over 1,300 participants across 106 teams, all eager to explore the capabilities of Google’s advanced Gemma 2 models. 🚀

The event kicked off with an on-site workshop at Google's Cloud Space in London, offering hands-on sessions and mentorship from industry experts.
It was there, during a fast-paced speed networking session, that I met the incredible folks who would soon become my teammates. 🤝
We vibed instantly—same curiosity, same hunger to build something cool—and decided to give this hackathon a real shot as a team.

Four strangers turned collaborators, united by a shared love for tech, coffee ☕, and big ideas — ByteTheNews was born from that spark. ⚡

As a team of four, we brainstormed and developed ByteTheNews—a Chrome extension designed to simplify news consumption by summarizing articles into bite-sized content and reading them aloud.
Our project leveraged technologies like OpenAI, Groq, Gemma 2, and ElevenLabs to enhance accessibility and provide a screen-free news experience.

After three intense days of coding 💻, collaboration 🤓, and innovation 🛠️, our efforts were recognized as we emerged as winners of the hackathon! 🏆


If you're curious to check out our project, you see it here Hackathon