AWS AI League: Last chance qualifiers, semifinals, remaining sessions and year 2026
The AI League kicked off full speed on the first day of AWS re:Invent. Read on for the results of the last chance qualification and the semfinals, and also for more opportunities to compete and learn.
AWS AI League is a way for you and your organisation build the AI skills for the modern business opportunities. Participants join a hands-on tournament to fight for prizes, trophies and bragging rights.
AWS AI League 2025
This year the competition grew from the initial pilot, inviting the organisations to run internal qualifiers, and individual developers in selected summits. The winners flew in to Las Vegas for the finale at the AWS re:Invent conference.
The task is to fine-tune a small LLM model to fulfil an objective which is shared during the tournament. The model is then submitted and evaluated against a much larger model and then a score is given to the submission. A submission receives requests and receives points for the submissions that win against the benchmark. The highest scorers win.
AWS also offered a last chance opportunity to qualify through a wildcard challenge.
The wildcard qualifiers
The qualifier workshop took place Monday morning at MGM and was an opportunity to claim one of the five remaining spots in the competition. 100 participants had an opportunity to follow a model fine-tuning workshop after which they have received a challenge for the day: Build a helpful agent to support AWS re:Invent participants wanting to learn about the sessions.
The participants jumped onto the challenge and started preparing their training sets. The challenge was very broad and the evaluation questions were not known.
The trained models were submitted to the AWS AI League service and evaluated, and the top 5 at 12:30 were invited to the next stage.
To those familiar with the AWS DeepRacer stage (a small pat on the back for myself here for not mentioning DeepRacer sooner) I will only mention that we've had a small gathering of the participants: rosscomp1, MarkRoss-Eviden, RobinCastro, Akashi and me, Breadcentric - all being part of the league over the years.
When the time came, the top five emerged:
- rosscomp1
- Arsenal
- martyh
- hayaok
- MarkRoss
The competition was fierce, especially for the fifth spot with the participants in places 5-7 scoring within 0.25 points of each other. Respect to yuzoGPT and clauacosta who kept Mark on the edge of his seat till the very end. In the end, Arsenal didn't accept their spot and yuzoGPT joined the group instead.
If you'd like to experience what it's like to participate in the AI League, you can visit the AI League zone at the Sands Expo. A nice accent is the live leaderboard that shows the results from the qualifiers.
The Semifinals
The participants have joined the semifinal challenge in the evening to a new surprise: the challenge is no longer model tuning. Instead, all participants went through a workshop in which they built agents to play a game: the Dungeon of Agentic Challenges.
The top three contestants qualify to the finals where the winner takes $15,000 dollars, second place $7,500 and the third $2,500.
Over three hours 30 contestants were using AgentCore to compose an agent to complete the board. The score was an outcome of multiple factors, including the agentic challenges, bonus gatherings and the path taken to complete the board.
The start was rather slow with many participants learning to build an agent but the competition began to gain pace with more and more entries submitted, and the top three changing rapidly.
Contestants took different strategies, some beginning with establishing the path, others preparing the tools and integration. In the end however, a strong leader group begun to emerge.
As most begun to believe no new surprises should be expected, five minutes before the end of the competition Ross submitted a model which did a clean run with high scores which after a complete score calculation has placed him in the final.
This is the final three:
- hermarth - 10995 points
- rosscomp1 - 10254 points
- deepesh002 - 10064 points
Of the honourable mentions RayG, the defender of last years title finished fifth.
Well done to the organisers, they have prepared a really interesting and exciting experience.
Join the finals, and more workshops!
Join the finals at the expo on Tuesday at 5PM in Theater 3 (event id GHJ001). The contestants will use the agents prepared in the semifinals to solve a new challenge.
There are still AWS AI League workshops in which you can not only learn how to solve the tasks in the league but also win up to $1000 AWS credits:
- GHJ401 on Tuesday at 12:30 pm at the MGM
- GHJ205 on Wednesday at 1:00 pm at the MGM, followed by a Gameshow (GHJ002) on Wednesday at 5:00 pm at the Expo
Join AWS AI League 2026
You can participate in the AI League through internal organisation events or individually.
Starting yesterday you can submit your organisation: do not hesitate and submit your interest using this form .
If you would like to participate as an individual, look for AWS Summits near you and participate in the qualifiers.
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