OpenAI recognized three projects created by Penn students earlier this month.
The inaugural ChatGPT Futures award, granted on May 6, recognized individual or team projects that were developed with the help of the artificial intelligence platform. Recipients are granted $10,000 and given access to ChatGPT’s “cutting-edge technologies” to further develop their enterprises.
The organization awarded 26 prizes to honor the Class of 2026 — the “first graduating class to have ChatGPT on hand for their entire university experience.”
Rising Wharton and Engineering sophomore Crystal Yang was recognized for the project Audemy, a platform that provides gaming resources to blind students. Yang told The Daily Pennsylvanian that she and her team have used ChatGPT for a variety of functions, from creating her first prototype to editing outreach emails.
“It’s been with us the whole time,” she added.
Since building her first game in high school, Yang’s platform has grown to feature 50 games, which have been accessed by 200,000 individuals. Yang said she plans to use the awarded $10,000 to develop Buzzle, an audio console for blind individuals that is currently in the pilot stage.
CaseLink — an AI tool developed by rising Engineering senior William Sanz and rising Wharton seniors Praja Tickoo and Jack Patel — was also awarded OpenAI’s prize.
The project, Tickoo told the DP, helps case managers efficiently create “personalized action plans for families” that are unhoused or facing housing instability. He added that the efficiency CaseLink provides allows case managers to “work with more families and provide more timely support to families and students.”
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Sanz said that the team used OpenAI’s coding agent — a platform accessed via Application Programming Interface credits, a prepaid virtual currency — to build CaseLink. As part of the ChatGPT Futures prize, OpenAI awarded additional API credits to the team.
“With the new API credits, we'll be able to test more and refine our model to make sure that the information is as relevant and accurate as it can be,” Sanz said.
Rising Engineering senior Parsa Idehpour was awarded a ChatGPT Futures prize for his project BioReason Pro, which allows users to understand each protein’s function.
“Our inspiration was in building AI scientists who can think better than humans and have superhuman capabilities,” Idehpour said. “They can help us cure diseases and understand biology better.”
Alongside a friend from high school, Idehpour created the model by inputting data into ChatGPT to make it into something “sensible and readable.” With OpenAI’s API credits and support from financial backers, Idehpour said that the team is training models at a “much higher scale.”
Idehpor said that he chose ChatGPT as opposed to other AI models because it had been “outperforming,” particularly in terms of “reliability” and “having the knowledge to do things accurately.”
