Build yourself flowers
Summary
Vicki Boykis' keynote transcript examines the state of machine learning engineering, emphasizing craft, context, and robustness over novelty. Using case studies like Viberary and Rijksearch, it covers embeddings, two-tower architectures, data sense, and the tradeoffs between hosted and local models, while highlighting mentorship and deliberate practice as keys to mastery. The piece argues that deep technical excellence remains essential as AI tools accelerate development.