Last Sunday, January 11, I hosted a live session with you to walk through my plans for 2026.
In this article, I want to keep things simple and do four things:
Share the recording of the live session (you'll find it right above 👆)
Share the slides I used during the session
Give you a quick bullet-point TL;DR, in case you don't want to watch the full 1h 30m replay
Introduce Antonio Zarauz Moreno, who'll be joining us for the Finetuning Sessions and the Document Intelligence Cohort
Before we dive in, I also want to celebrate a big milestone from the session: we hit 220 active connections on the live stream! 🎉
With numbers like that, I'm confident we'll reach 1,000 by the end of next year 😎
Sharing the slides
As promised, here are the slides from our last live session, covering new content formats, project ideas, and what's coming next.
Session Highlights
➤ New Content Format: Cohorts vs. Articles + Office Hours
We kicked things off by introducing a new content format for 2026: cohorts, and how they differ from the current Articles + Office Hours format. In short:
Articles + Office Hours
Ongoing articles paired with live office hour sessions
Included in the Premium Substack subscription
Best example: the Phone Calling Agents Course
Cohort Courses
More hands-on and demanding (you build alongside us)
Limited seats and smaller groups
Fully personalized feedback
Weekly assignments and final capstone project
Reduced, focused group office hours
Not included in the Premium Substack
Premium subscribers get early access and discounts
Remaining seats open to the wider audience
➤ The 5 Core Projects Planned for 2026
Next, we walked through the five core projects we've planned for 2026, along with their formats:
ML Systems → Articles + Office Hours (included in the premium subscription)
Finetuning Sessions → Articles + Office Hours (included in the premium subscription)
AI Systems Engineering Journey → Articles + Office Hours (included in the premium subscription)
Document Intelligence → Cohort
Recommender Systems → Cohort
➤ Community Poll Results: Your Top Priorities
We then reviewed your responses to the polls, especially the one where you voted on the most interesting topics to cover. Here are the top three:
🥇 Gold — AI Systems Engineering Journey
🥈 Silver — Document Intelligence
🥉 Bronze — Finetuning Sessions
➤ What Gets Built Next (Timeline)
Based on the discussion and poll results, here's the current roadmap:
Articles + Office Hours
Early February → Finetuning Sessions
Mid-March onward → AI Systems Engineering Journey
Cohorts
Mid-April → Document Intelligence
If anything changes along the way, I'll communicate it clearly, so don't worry!
➤ Live Q&A
We wrapped things up with an open Q&A, where I answered all your questions and doubts.
🙋 If anything else comes up after watching the replay, feel free to drop your questions in the comments, I'll be keeping an eye on them! 👀
Introducing Antonio Zarauz Moreno
I'm excited to share that Antonio Zarauz Moreno will be joining me for the Finetuning Sessions and the Document Intelligence cohort.
Antonio is an AI Research Tech Lead at Credicorp with a strong background in taking ideas out of the lab and turning them into real, scalable systems (exactly what we do here at The Neural Maze!)
He works across areas like finetuning, document intelligence, multimodal models, and production-grade AI architectures—always with a strong focus on open-source and real-world impact.
He'll help us go deeper on both finetuning and document intelligence, bringing a very practical, hands-on perspective.
Really looking forward to building these with him! 😍
Next Wednesday, Antonio will make his first contribution to The Neural Maze with a masterclass on AI System Design, focused on how to build production-ready chatbots.
I'm sure you're going to enjoy it a lot, especially since system design is something many of you have been asking about lately.
And that's it for now! Hope you enjoy the roadmap session, the slides, and everything we have planned ahead. Thanks, as always, for being part of The Neural Maze, and I'll see you very soon in the next session.
Ciao builder! 👋
