How to Learn ML in 2026 interview

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Yacine of Deep Learning with Yacine. He posed a lot of very thoughtful questions and I had a great time. Please check it out! The lightly edited transcript follows, auto-transcribed with faster-whisper and then reviewed by me for correctness, adding links for context, and editing out a lot of “I think” and “um” and “like” selectively. (Yacine) A lot of people asked me how to get into machine learning in 2026. Instead of giving you my usual advice, I figured it’d be way more interesting to sit down with expert contributors who have like a diverse background and ask them what do you think about that. So today we’re chatting with the legendary Vicki Boykis. She’s an absolute gem if you know her from Twitter and Bluesky at giving well-grounded advice that are full of pragmatism. She has a pretty impressive career so far. She built a recommendation system at Tumblr. She worked on the ML platform at Duo Security. She worked on LLMs at Mozilla.ai…