Alibaba Cloud and FLock.io Host AI Hackathon for Student Developers from Leading Korean Universities

Discovering the latest Qwen AI models while fostering Korea’s AI talent ecosystem

Seoul, Korea, August 7, 2025 – Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, successfully hosted an international AI hackathon in collaboration with FLock.io, a next-generation decentralized AI training platform powered by federated learning and blockchain. The event brought together student developers from leading Korea universities, further fostering the country’s AI research and talent ecosystem.



Held from 28 July to 2 August, the hackathon centered on hands-on projects and development using Qwen, Alibaba’s flagship open-source large language models (LLMs). Over 40 developers from Korea’s top universities participated —including Seoul National University, Korea University, Yonsei University, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)— working together on next-generation decentralized AI applications, leveraging federated learning.

Organized in the format of a datathon, participants used FLock.io’s AI Arena platform to fine-tune the Qwen models for specific industry needs. Qwen is recognised for its robust multilingual understanding and generation capabilities, as well as its high performance and scalability. Its open-source flexibility and active user community make Qwen highly suited to a wide range of industries and position it as the preferred model for researchers and practitioners alike.

During the hackathon, Alibaba Cloud’s technical team provided comprehensive support, including an on-site workshop explaining Qwen’s architecture and fine-tuning capabilities. Participants gained hands-on experience with Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure and AI technology, leveraging robust computing resources within state-of-the-art development environments. They also gained advanced know-how in AI architecture design, data processing, and distributed learning, thereby acquiring valuable experience in building solutions that meet global standards.

At the hackathon, participants from Yonsei University and Korea University were recognized for their creative AI solutions built on Qwen and were selected as the three winning teams. The winning projects included an AI model for investment decision-making through valuation, fundamental and sentiment analysis, and a Web3 agent designed to support blockchain operations by integrating Qwen with external applications.

Yoon Yong-joon, Country Manager of South Korea, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said, “The hackathon was a meaningful opportunity for Korea’s talented student developers to work hands-on with global-level AI models and showcase their skills. Alibaba Cloud will continue to strengthen its role as a technology hub connecting education, research, and practice, actively supporting AI innovation and talent development in Korea.”

Jiahao Sun, CEO FLock.io said, “As AI research and development shift toward distributed and open environments, it is essential for students to gain real-world experience with federated learning-based applications. This hackathon was a valuable opportunity to discover the next generation of AI innovators and witness the potential of the global AI ecosystem.”

Last month, Alibaba launched its Qwen3-Coder, the company’s most advanced agentic AI coding model to date. Designed for high-performance software development, Qwen3-Coder excels in agentic AI coding tasks, from generating new codes and managing complex coding workflows to debugging across entire codebases.

Qwen3 models, the latest generation of Qwen Family, supports 119 languages and has demonstrated exceptional performance in multilingual mathematical reasoning and translation, particularly in Asian languages, according to public datasets.

Since August 2023, Alibaba Cloud has actively contributed to the open-source AI community, releasing over 200 advanced AI models. Those open-source efforts have resonated widely, as evidenced by the Qwen family surpassing 400 million downloads on platforms like Hugging Face and ModelScope and over 140,000 models built on Qwen by third parties, making it one of the most prominent AI model families worldwide.

About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services. Alibaba has been named the leading IaaS provider in Asia Pacific by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner. It has also maintained its position as one of the world’s leading public cloud IaaS service providers since 2018, according to IDC.