#133 How to get Machine Learning Skills without doing a PhD in Math [Podcast #133 with Daniel Bourke]
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 19 July 2024
⏱️ 131 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Daniel Bourke. He's a Machine Learning Engineer and creator of many popular tutorials on YouTube. He's also a frequent freeCodeCamp contributor.
We talk about:
- How as a kid he hacked into his school's network and gave himself good grades, just like the kid from Wargames. (Don't try this at home.)
- What he learned from helping fix 5,000 people's computers
- How Machine Learning actually works. What the AI models are actually doing for you in the background.
- His advice for anyone getting into Machine Learning in 2024, in terms of what to prioritize learning
Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 2020 song by an Australian musician.
Also, I want to thank the 9,779 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
Links we talk about during our conversation:
Daniel's 26-hour PyTorch course on freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-pytorch-for-deep-learning-in-day/
Nutrify, Daniel's "pokedex for food". Uses computer vision to map photos of food to nutrition data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jpLqtAWKfo
Daniel's Charles Bukowski-inspired novel "Charlie Walks": https://www.charliewalks.com/
The research website Daniel mentions: https://arxiv.org/
Daniel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrdbourke
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Programming to me is just thinking. |
| 0:02.0 | Like a lot of my time, I think if people get the idea of like, if you're a software engineer, |
| 0:07.9 | you just spend all day writing code. |
| 0:11.3 | I would say now majority, like I do write a lot of code. |
| 0:16.6 | However, I use AI tools such as GitHub Copilot to write a lot of the boilerplate. |
| 0:23.6 | ... Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org. Each week we're bringing |
| 0:56.0 | you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people getting into tech. This week, |
| 1:01.2 | we're joined by Daniel Burke. Daniel is a machine learning engineer. He's the creator of many |
| 1:08.0 | popular tutorials on YouTube, and he's a frequent contributor to the Free Code Camp YouTube channel. |
| 1:14.3 | Daniel, welcome to the podcast. |
| 1:16.9 | Hey, Quincy. |
| 1:18.0 | It's great to be here. |
| 1:19.7 | I actually started to learn to code back in the day. |
| 1:22.2 | I think it was about 2017 on Free Code Camp. |
| 1:26.1 | I remember going through all the projects and so yeah, it's really |
| 1:29.1 | cool to be here. Absolutely, man. It's great to have you here. And I just want to emphasize that |
| 1:34.1 | it's an honor to count among our alumni somebody like yourself who not only goes out and |
| 1:41.4 | practices like kind of leading edge machine learning techniques, but also |
| 1:45.8 | turned around and teaches other people how to do that. |
| 1:48.5 | That's super chill. |
| 1:49.8 | And I also want to acknowledge that a couple years ago, you had a pretty good year on YouTube, |
| 1:56.8 | and you turned around and you donated the proceeds from your YouTube channel to Free Code Camp, to our charity. |
... |
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