My girlfriend left me due to an NLP Competition

Yep, seems odd but I am unsure how to take it now.

A little bit of background: I have been participating in Deep Learning related competitions for a pretty long time. I am 25 right now, started in the field when I was 20. Started from Keras, then PyTorch then eventually chose Tensorflow because that gave me an edge with GPU parallelization and every firm around my region uses TF / helping me get a better job.

I dropped out of college, left my degree that majored in statistics and realised that AI was something that I could learn without spending a buck. It worked out pretty well. I eventually applied to a Speakers Giant ( can’t name ofc ) for the position of a data scientist and they gave it to me. Which was pretty fricking nuts given that I was doing research in NLP on a scale that was not professional.

That jump gave me hope in life that I won’t die as a dork with new cash. I eventually got a girlfriend. She was my colleague there, she left tho, to work at another firm 5 months ago.

The downfall started when I came across this ML challenge at a website called AIcrowd. I had participated and won a ton at Kaggle but this was new. I started making submissions and boom there it was. The ping noise. The sheer tension between me and time as I rushed to make more submissions. They were giving the participants like $10000+ for winning this thing and I was not even focused on that. Four days went away before I actually got out of my room, these were my stretches. Separating these sounds and making submissions felt like sex. I had never seen anything like this before.

I stopped answering my girlfriend’s texts initially, I would complete office assignments at night. I pretended to have a throat allergy to avoid office calls. We had been dating for a year and she had always hated my instinct to participate in these challenges which she looked down upon. She felt that I did them for the quick money, when I did it for the growth in my skills (Well Kaggle paid okayish, this AIcrowd’s prizes are nuts tho).

She called me a couple of days ago, asked me what would I do if she left due to my obsession. I told her that let me tighten up my ranking and then we could talk. Lol she broke up over text. F*ck.

I am still on top of the challenge’s leader board tho.

W