I used to think success was a matter of luck. You wait for the universe to hand you something. These days I ask: what can I do to keep replicating lucky streaks for myself? The answer has been learning fast and persistently exploring every idea through technology. Meaning is not something you wait for. It is something you build because you cannot stand not building it.
The fifty philosophers here have 2,500 years of answers. Socrates says meaning is questioning itself. Frankl says it is the attitude you take toward what you cannot change. The Buddha says drop the craving and the question dissolves. I am not here to disagree with any of them. I am simply describing what I actually did. On December 12, 2023, we released MaLLaM — Malaysia’s first locally trained large language model, with early support from NVIDIA, Microsoft, and AWS. We trained it to understand Bahasa Melayu, our regional languages, our dialects. Not because a philosopher told us to. Because if we did not build it, nobody else here would.
That is the only kind of meaning I trust. Not a conclusion you arrive at, but a thing you ship to production. It breaks. You fix it. It breaks differently. You learn something you could not have learned by thinking. This is what I call The Future Is Solo: I want to know whether a person in Malaysia, with AI as their co-founder, can build a one-person company worth a billion dollars by 2030 — which is also when DeepMind projects AGI. I might fail. Most experiments fail. But sitting around debating whether meaning is discovered or invented is itself a form of avoidance. You are not going to think your way to an answer. You are going to build your way there, or you are never going to get there.
I am a techno-optimist. That means I believe the tools we build can deepen human capability rather than replace it. But optimism is not hope. It is a decision to act under uncertainty. Sartre says we are condemned to be free. I would put it differently: we are condemned to build. Every day you open your laptop you are casting a vote about what kind of world you are constructing. There is no neutral choice. There is no skipping your turn.
The question is not whether life has meaning. The question is whether you will have built anything worth the time you spent on it. What will you make of the time you have?