Organising Malaysia’s largest AI competition for youths

We recently organised Malaysia’s largest AI competition for youths, bringing 2,000 students together to build the future.

We brought in students (15 to 19 years old) from across Malaysia, including Sabah and Sarawak, for the finals of the National AI Competition (NAIC) at Sunway University.

They competed in tracks like: 🦾 Innovation: Vibe code working, genuinely useful products. 🎨 Generative Art: Make AI films to tell a story. 🚀 Engineering: Design AI systems for sustainable cities. 👾 Computing: Train AI models for healthcare screening. 🏠 Architecture: Reimagine future learning environments.

This was a massive collaboration between Rakan Tutor (an NGO I am a part of), and Sunway University who were co-organisers and sponsors of the event.

Also supported by the Ministry of Education Malaysia Kementerian Pelajaran Malaysia and sponsors like YTL AI Labs for ILMU.AI credits for the students.

Last Saturday was the Grand Finals, where teams pitched solutions and set up booths to win from a pool of RM2 million worth of Sunway College bursaries and RM35k worth of ILMU.AI coding credits.

This was one of my favourite projects this year. As Rakan Tutor's NAIC event director, I worked closely with Sunway in designing the competition, shape tracks, bring together the judges from industry, and mentor teams.

I am so proud of how it turned out.

While a masiveeee congratulations to the winners, all teams produced inspiring work at the cutting edge of AI. For most of them, this was their first exposure to working with AI, and many had super creative ideas that exceeded our expectations by a long mile. They vibe coded production ready apps with users, made super creative films, trained models, thought deeply about designing solutions they’d want.

And that’s what this was really about. The bigger goal of this initiative isn’t to identify the winners, but creating a space to prep 2,000 students for an uncertain future and upskill them in the latest tech to be able to be great, creative problem solvers.

I’m grateful to my team at Rakan Tutor for helping make this happen, especially Kaveen Parthiban, Kai Song Eer, Yi Ven Low, the team as Sunway University for the support and who were amazing collaborators Elizabeth Lee, Clemen Irwin Tan, Tay Ming Jack, Cindy Chow and the academic teams, Fadrizul Hasani and YTL AI Labs for the support, all the judges who volunteered their time to support the kids, workshop speakers, all the parents, teachers for your support.

And most of all the students. Hope you had fun & learned some cool stuff! and wishing you all the best in your careers too. Feel free to reach out if there’s anything I can do to help down the road too.

And to anyone reading who feels like doing something similar, go for it. We need loads more people pushing for change & more leaders at companies engaging in these major initiatives and shaping the future. Every effort counts.