Good morning friends! âď¸
This is the first edition since I made a slight direction shift in this newsletter, so I hope you enjoy it!
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A few months ago, my line manager asked me what area of data science I wanted to specialize in. My reply was that I donât really know yet.
No matter what industry you are in, chances are you need to specialize in one area. Doctors, Actuaries, Bankers, and Lawyers are all examples of âtraditionalâ careers where throughout the years, you gain an expert set of skills in one domain.
The harsh reality is that everything has so much depth you canât simply be a jack of all trades, particularly if you want to progress to the top echelon of your profession.
There exist outliers like Elon Musk, but most of us will not be experts in AI, Rocket Science, and Business. Itâs simply improbable for most humans.
People may disagree, but in my opinion, you need to have some specialism. Look at Andrej Karpathy, former director of AI at Tesla and Research Scientist at OpenAI. His area of expertise is in Deep Learning (even though this field is quite broad) and has gotten him very far.
The question begs, how do you choose your specialty?
There is no correct answer, but the general advice is to choose the area you enjoy the most. Now, this may be true, but there is another school of thought that says you enjoy what you are good at. So, itâs probably good to choose a specialism that will be in demand in the future, even if itâs not the area you enjoy the most.
The ideal goal is to find something in the overlapping region of what you enjoy and what is in demand. Chances are, over time you will enjoy the niche regardless as you will become good at it.
To find the areas you like, I recommend utilizing the explore-exploit strategy. You simply try and learn about loads of things, then you dive into an area you like the most.
I am still in the exploration stage as I have only been working as a Data Scientist for two years. There are still a few things I want to dabble in before I really narrow down. In an ideal world, I would be a 10X Data Scientist and be a specialist in everything, but thatâs unlikely to be the case!
Whatâs Been Cooking đĽ
Some tasty stories this week:
Meta Targets AGI â Zuckerberg announced this week that Meta is actively researching and pursuing Artificial General Intelligence.
Microsoft Copilot Pro â Copilot Pro is a premium version of Microsoftâs AI chatbot across its suite of products.
AI At World Economic Forum â Top AI leaders such as Sam Altman and Yann LeCun attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week.
Weekly Favourites â¤ď¸
đ§ŞÂ Journal Paper - Retentive Networks. This is a really interesting research paper published by Microsoft Research. It details a potential new machine learning algorithm that is better than Transformers and Recurrent Neural Networks.
đ°Â Newsletter â High Growth Engineer by Jordan Cutler. Another fantastic newsletter for any tech professional. Jordan gives great advice on how to accelerate your career.
đŹÂ YouTube â Two Minute Papers. Like most people, I havenât got time to read several research papers a week. This channel solves that problem. It breaks down the big research papers into short videos with great animations.
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you đ)