Games as Gateways to Machine Learning Mastery

Artificial intelligence is transforming industries at lightning speed and redefining the future of work as we know it.

But as I’ve witnessed firsthand throughout my journey, access to opportunities in this exploding field is far from equal. I have seen brilliant minds and self-taught prodigies go unrecognized simply because they lack the “right” credentials or don’t follow a traditional path. I firmly believe that AI has the potential to greatly benefit humanity, from advancing medical research to solving complex global challenges. AI is critical for our future.

So the problem is clear: even if they don’t have a Ph.D. from a fancy university or, for that matter, any degree at all.

That’s why I’m so passionate about creating opportunities for people to demonstrate their skills in the field of AI. While credentials are certainly impressive, and a great way to easily identify if someone has done the prerequisite work to become a machine learning professional—or a professional in any field—there are so many skilled and talented individuals out there who don’t have a way to access them. So if we want to source and showcase this “nontraditional” talent, we need a platform where anyone can compete against those with credentials to show that they have the right skills. That’s why I founded ArenaX Labs.

I have always loved math. As a child, I was irresistibly drawn to the reassuring certainty of numbers and utterly captivated by how I could use them in probability-based games like poker and blackjack. Mathematics held an almost poetic beauty to me—in its domain, there was no room for ambiguity or shades of gray. You were either unequivocally right or unquestionably wrong, with no hiding behind subjective rhetoric.

As a teen, my love of the subject led me to become intensely fascinated by the intricacies of the stock market. Although I didn’t know the terminology at the time, I wondered if I could create a “function approximator” for various stocks—something that could predict future asset prices based on historical data and other relevant information. The answer, as I would gradually uncover, lay in the field of machine learning.

And so my journey into the world of machine learning began with a pivotal guest lecture in my senior year at the university. Electrified by the speaker’s cutting-edge work in algorithmic trading, I made a beeline to the podium after the talk, convincing him to take me on as a protégé. I wanted to learn anything he was willing to teach me.

What followed were months of grueling 18-hour days spent mastering the R programming language (those who have used R know how painful it can be) while juggling a full course load. After graduating, it took a few months, but eventually I was thrilled to land a job as a “quant,” or quantitative analyst, at a pension fund. The person who gave me the job—another key mentor who was willing to take a chance on me—was Wei Xie, who would later become my co-founder at ArenaX Labs.

But as I advanced in my career, I was repeatedly struck by a troubling pattern. Time and again, I saw gifted individuals passed over for prime positions because they didn’t have the “right” credentials or pedigree, even though they had painstakingly taught themselves all the requisite skills through sheer discipline and self-directed study. I reflected on my own nontraditional path and how easily it could have dead-ended early on without the intervention of key mentors who gave me a real chance to prove my worth.

A vision began to take shape in my mind: a platform to connect overlooked machine learning practitioners with the opportunities their talents deserved on a global scale. I imagined a worldwide hub where anyone, regardless of background, could gain hands-on experience, showcase their skills and be recognized for their accomplishments based on merit alone.

This is why I took the plunge in 2021 and launched ArenaX Labs, quickly launching our flagship product: AI Arena, a no-code game that made the abstract concepts of machine learning accessible and engaging to a broader audience. The game acts as the bridge to SAI—a gamified research platform hosting machine learning competitions where we eventually want people to get paid for developing high-performing machine learning models.

Our mission with these offerings was to make machine learning more accessible and enjoyable to aspiring developers around the world. By gamifying the process of learning and applying machine learning techniques, we aimed to attract more people to explore this crucial skill set in a fun and engaging way. Ultimately, our goal is to increase machine learning literacy and proficiency on a global scale, as we believe it will be one of the most important abilities in the coming years. Through the power of play, we hope to inspire a new generation of machine learning professionals.

Brandon Da Silva is the founder and CEO of ArenaX Labs, a technology company based in Toronto that is dedicated to teaching the world about AI through the power of play.