Now that the competition has come to a close, I’m curious to know how many submissions there were!
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Since YouTube is the landing place of the Gemini promotional content that all produce, you can start counting there, with search terms like “gemini ai contest entry”, and filters…
There’s many to watch if you are curious, and many that overtly leaned into particular score categories.
That’s the unknown that prevents one from having made a reasonable calculation of the gambling in developing and entering - not just how many entries, but how many $1M+ companies would invest a good part of the potential $100,000 reward (or what to do with a car) and co-sponsored advertising reward to be a top contender with their already developed idea… and how many others go unrewarded for producing for Google (Anthropic gave their similar entrants $5 in credit…)
It’s like the Boston Marathon, there’s a lot more “good jobs” then there are actual winners for your entry costs.
We’ll probably hear the numbers if it is an impressive count, and will probably take consideration of all entrants to find who has not met the qualifying rules to come up with a final tally.
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I counted around 630 entries using a similar filter. Sure, there are a lot of those that will not be eligible, but if half of that were will be quite a competition.
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A lot… 4x that number.
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You guys gonna be reeeaaaally busy the next days!
Wow! That means 3/4th of the submissions had their videos unlisted (i.e. hidden from search results on YouTube).
Or maybe lots of them didn’t make a video at all?
It just means they didn’t put Gemini AI competition in their video title
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True! Or #buildwithgemini I guess. It didn’t say it was a requirement so it’s fine.
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2500 projects seems a bit excessive for the prize pool. I’ve been participating in hackathons like this in Devpost and with this prize pool you usually get a a few hundred valid projects. This means google was very good marketing the hackathon
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This is my first time competing in a competition since high school—about 15 years ago—so I’m not sure whether the number of participants is large or not.
However, to put things in perspective, Y Combinator receives around 20,000 applications every four months and selects 250 startups to fund, offering $125K upfront for 7% equity, with a commitment to invest $375K more later for additional equity. That’s a 1.5% acceptance rate.
In comparison, the Gemini contest is offering 10 prizes ranging from $50K to $300K for 2,000+ applicants without taking any equity. That’s an acceptance rate of about 0.5%. It’s a great deal for competitors, and an even better deal for Google.
Before this contest, many of us, including myself, primarily used other AI APIs or open-source LLMs for our projects. But now, after trying Gemini, I’m a believer. The pricing is very competitive, and the large context capability is unmatched.
This competition was a perfect fit for me since I’ve been using LLM APIs, Flutter, and Firebase for my own apps over the past 2 years. It was a lot of fun to build something new!
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Wow, I thought there would be more given the prize pool and the fact that there are millions of devs in the world. Never would’ve thought 2500 submission would be considered excessive by hackathon standards. (FYI: This is my first hackathon)
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Well, hackathons (depending on what kind) tend to be smaller, about ~100ish people or so will submit at the end of one. Conversely, most hackathons do not have ads for them, and lately other hackathon prizes are a lot more about credits than actual cash, so this was a pretty shiny prize pool.
What I really want to see is what categories people went with.
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I made a SIMPLE Video, like making Videos isnt a Skill of mine, I can code, I can Edit Videos but… I cannot make them xD
I also published my Video as “unlisted”, due to my Youtube Account being used for AMVs, so it would kinda confuse my Subscribers if I randomly upload a “How to use my App” Video 
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I’ve been competing on DevPost and lablab.ai and Google’s prize is chunky enough in my opinion. Fractional prize pools had couple of thousand registrants, even though in the end usually there are some hundred valid submissions.
I never went for the purse though, I want to gain experience. (Plus if I place I surely list it on my LinkedIn)
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The question is if those are vetted and valid submissions. If yes then that’s a very sizeable field I think.
Just don’t overwork yourself. The timeline was estimated anyway, everyone can wait an extra week or however much it takes, your health is more important.
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