The second edition of the Global Prompt Engineering Championship concluded on Wednesday during Dubai AI Week, with winners being crowned by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s Crown Prince and the UAE’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister. This year’s competition attracted nearly 3 800 participants from 125 countries, competing for the title of top prompt engineer across four categories: art, video, gaming, and coding.

The championship finals took place over two days at AREA 2071 in Emirates Towers, where 24 finalists from 16 countries showcased their skills in live competitions. The winners shared a prize pool of AED 1 million, gaining international recognition and exposure to industry leaders. Sheikh Hamdan emphasized the increasing significance of prompt engineering as a vital skill in the AI era, reiterating Dubai’s goal to become a global hub for top talent in this innovative field.

Abdulrahman Al Marzooqi from the UAE, who is a master’s student in Machine Learning at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), secured first place in the Coding category. The Video category award was claimed by Syrian filmmaker Ibrahim Hajjo, who is a Senior Filmmaker at Hajjo Media. In the Gaming category, the winner was Ibrahim Helmy from Canada, a Senior Cloud Solutions Architect (Data & AI) at Microsoft. Lastly, the Art category was won by Yahya Kaddoura from Palestine, an Architectural Designer and Associate Principal at Atkins.

Finalists faced challenges that tested their creativity and technical abilities using advanced generative AI tools. In the Art category, participants interpreted the theme “Time Travel in Two Frames,” creating two images of the same object or place in different time periods. In the Video category, they produced a 15- to 20-second cinematic scene inspired by wildlife documentaries, featuring an animal in an unexpected yet realistic setting.

The Gaming category’s theme, “One Minute Hero,” required finalists to design a game where players had just 60 seconds to save the world, with each playthrough being unique. Meanwhile, those in the Coding category were tasked with developing an AI-powered emergency response assistant, an app designed to provide calm and accurate real-time support during various crises in Dubai.