Dubai crowns champions in prompt engineering

The winners of the second edition of the Global Prompt Engineering Championship were announced on Wednesday during Dubai AI Week.

His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai's Crown Prince and the UAE's Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, crowned the winners. 

This year’s competition drew nearly 3,800 participants from 125 countries, all vying for the title of top prompt engineer across four main categories: art, video, gaming and coding.

The championship finals were held over two days at AREA 2071 in Emirates Towers, with 24 finalists from 16 countries selected to compete live in Dubai.

The winners received a share of the AED 1 million prize pool, along with international recognition and exposure to industry leaders.

Sheikh Hamdan highlighted the growing importance of prompt engineering as a key skill in the AI era, and reaffirmed Dubai’s ambition to become a global capital for top talent in this cutting-edge field.

We awarded the winners of the second edition of the Global Prompt Engineering Championship today, which attracted nearly 3,800 participants from 125 countries, all competing for the title of top prompt engineer across four main categories during Dubai AI Week. AI is creating a… pic.twitter.com/omorOBgAux

— Hamdan bin Mohammed (@HamdanMohammed) April 23, 2025

Winners

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

Final Challenges: Creativity Meets Capability

Finalists were challenged to create original, high-quality outputs using advanced generative AI tools, guided by precise, creative and time-bound prompts.

Each finalist competed under pressure in a real-time prompt challenge designed to test their ingenuity and prompt-crafting skill.

Finalists in the Art category were challenged to interpret the theme ‘Time Travel in Two Frames’ by creating two images of the same object or place set in different time periods—juxtaposing eras while maintaining a shared visual identity.

In the Video category, participants were tasked with producing a 15–20 second cinematic scene inspired by wildlife documentaries, featuring an animal in an entirely unexpected yet realistic setting—blending authenticity with surrealism.

In the Gaming category, themed ‘One Minute Hero’, finalists were challenged to develop a game in which players have just 60 seconds to save the world. Every run is unique, and the game subtly adapts to previous attempts.

Meanwhile, finalists in the Coding category were tasked with creating an AI-powered emergency response assistant—an intuitive app designed to provide calm, accurate, real-time support during crises in Dubai, ranging from medical emergencies to lost travel documents.