UAE: Meet the winners who bagged Dh1 million in global prompt engineering contest
Abdulrahman Almarzooqi, a master's student at Mohammed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), is no stranger with being placed first place in a competition.
Previously winning the Emirates Skills National Competition along with his brother, Almarzooqi took the first-place trophy for the prompt engineering competition in coding, and said he was proud to represent his country, the UAE, in this global competition.
Almarzooqi, along with three others, won first place in the Global Prompt Engineering Championship and walked away with a collective Dh1 million prize. Prompt engineering, though it sounds intricate and intimidating, is the technical term for requesting a generative AI tool (like ChatGPT) to perform a task. In other words, it is how you talk to the AI.
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The competition took place on April 22 and April 23 at the Boulevard Emirates Towers, on the sidelines of Dubai AI Week 2025. Participants from all academic and professional backgrounds competed across four creative categories: art, video, gaming, and coding, which are modes through which a machine can be communicated with.
Winner of the gaming category Ibrahim Helmy, a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, never expected to even be chosen to participate. When he tried applying to join the championship, he did not have high hopes to be selected out of a pool of thousands, but his family and friends pushed him to try.
'Programming is my profession and gaming is my passion," Helmy said. 'I participated in this challenge because I tried to combine both. It was an interesting experience to try and mix both.'
The programmer said he had to relearn much of what he knew about gaming because he needed to write the prompts from the perspective of a player and a game developer at the same time. 'There are obstacles, there are the players, the control, the environment, the tone, the visuals, and the audio,' he said. 'These are all things that make up a game, and if you miss one [element], you immediately notice it.'
During the championship, Helmy said 'it felt super nerve-wracking knowing that they were going to be watching all the time. Sometimes AI can be frustrating."
'I can spend hours yelling at it. But the minute I sat in that seat, I started typing, and everything disappeared and faded," he added.
Not just for coders
Although the other categories required previous knowledge of programming, the video and art category were a little more flexible. Filmmaker Ibrahim Hajjo joined the competition because he was already familiar with the video editing world.
However, he did not know much about AI tools, so decided to begin practicing the "science' of prompting once he signed up. With only two months of practice up his sleeve, Hajjo did not expect to win the competition in that designated category.
During the tense 30 minutes the participants were given in the first round, Hajjo did as much as he could to bring out his creative side, but he said it was challenging.
Yahya Kaddoura, architect and urban designer, was already working with AI in his field, not just for generating ideas, but using it to challenge whatever ideas or designs he works with.
But he had to put his skills to the test in preparation for the championship in the art category and had to follow a series of steps to skew the ai machine to produce content to his liking. 'It was three stages. One is challenging the idea until I get a narrative for it. You need one image to explain that idea, so you create a narrative out of it.' He continued, 'After that is generating [the image]. Then editing it to do the final touches.
Although the participants in the art category were given 20 minutes for the first round, Kaddoura had his final product in half the time. He said he prepared well before the competition. 'I was doing different practices,' he said. 'I had a bootcamp of almost three weeks with my friends, with a timer and everything.'
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