Good morning friends! ☕️
I am writing this newsletter on a rainy day while on the train back from Coventry where I had gone to celebrate my girlfriend's cousin's birthday.
For those not from the UK, Coventry is a city in the middle of England. It was heavily bombed during the Second World War due to its role as a center for military production.
Anyway, let’s talk about something I have been thinking a lot about this week! 😀
Pretty much everyone has heard the quote “Life is a game.” However, something is missing in that sentence that slightly adjusts its meaning, the idea of an “Infinite game.”
Finite games are very straightforward to understand. A Football match is a finite game as there is a clear objective on how to win and a defined time limit. The goal is to reach the end.
Infinite games are more complex. There are many unknown players, the rules constantly change, and there is no end. The target is purely to continue to play endlessly.
I see most of my projects as infinite games:
YouTube: I try to put out one video a week and improve each time. I don’t focus too much on the views, subscribers, or numbers as there is no final target I want to reach.
Blog: This is my online learning journal and there are infinite things to learn, particularly in data science. Therefore, I will never stop learning and writing about it.
Newsletter: This weekly newsletter is my place to share some of my thoughts which hopefully can resonate with someone out there. My commitment is to write it every week indefinitely.
Of course, those above things are very specific to me, but even a job is an infinite game. If you get a promotion, you ‘level’ up, but there is no maximum level. The whole point is purely to play and enjoy learning and getting better.
By shifting your mindset to think in terms of being in an infinite game, your perspective changes a lot. You start thinking in terms of process and not short-term goals. The process is something you can control, and the end goal you rarely can. This all links to "journey before destination."
This especially rings true for us Data Scientists and tech professionals out there. You can never ‘complete’ programming (although would be amazing if you could) as there are too many areas to explore. This should be exciting as you can always pick up something new if you feel like you’re stagnant in your career.
An infinite game is something you can never win or lose and that’s what’s beautiful about it. The key message is to enjoy every step as much as you can and continue growing.
What’s Been Cooking 🥘
Some tasty stories this week:
Sam Altman Fired From OpenAI - Probably the most shocking story this week was the ousting of Sam Altman from OpenAI, a company he co-founded with Elon Musk. The board said Altman had not been "consistently candid with his communications."
GPT-5 To Have Superintelligence - Despite his sacking, Sam Altman a few days prior revealed that OpenAI is working on GPT-5. Altman suggested it may have superintelligence but would require more funding from Microsoft.
Microsoft’s AI Chips - At their recent Ignite conference, Microsoft announced their new Maia chip, which is specifically designed for LLMs and their Azure AI platform.
Weekly Favourites ❤️
🎬 YouTube - Tintin Smith. Tintin is a YouTuber who works for Ali Abdaal (I know I have mentioned him again!). He does great videos on YouTube optimisation and general life advice for people in their mid-20s.
📚 Book - Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow. This is THE book for anyone who wants to learn or know more about data science and machine learning. I have been using it as my go-to reference text for the past week.
🛠️ Tool - Notion. I know I am probably quite late to the game with Notion, but it is a great planning and ‘second brain’ tool for anyone. I have been using it a lot to organise my backlog of blog posts and videos as well as an ad-hoc to-do list.
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you 😎)