Emmett Fear

We sponsored TreeHacks 2026 at Stanford, where teams built on Runpod across 36 hours, shipping projects ranging from GPU-accelerated cancer drug discovery to real-time brain-to-music generation. Our top prizes went to RepoRx, NeuroBlocks, HackOverflow, and ADapt.

In early December 2025, Mistral AI released Mistral Large 3 and Devstral 2, two open models under the Apache 2.0 license, with Mistral Large 3 targeting frontier-scale reasoning and long-context workloads and Devstral 2 focusing on developer use cases like coding and agent workflows. At the same time, Nvidia expanded its open source footprint with the release of the Nemotron 3 model family and the acquisition of SchedMD, reinforcing a broader shift toward open models and open infrastructure that teams can run, benchmark, and scale on their own GPU platforms.

Runpod enhanced its referral program with exciting new features including randomized rewards up to $500, a premium affiliate tier offering 10% cash commissions, and continued lifetime earnings for existing users, creating more ways than ever to earn while building the future of AI infrastructure.