Who to Follow

The AI landscape moves fast. These are the people, newsletters, and shows worth adding to your reading list.

Researchers & Educators

Andrej Karpathy

Ex-OpenAI Research Director · Ex-Tesla AI

The best educator on how neural networks actually work. “Neural Networks: Zero to Hero” is the gold standard.

Links: X @karpathy, YouTube, Blog

Lilian Weng

VP of Research Safety · OpenAI

Writes the most thorough deep-dives on AI topics — agents, RLHF, diffusion models, alignment.

Links: X @lilianweng, Blog

Sebastian Raschka

Staff Research Engineer · Lightning AI

Author of Build a Large Language Model from Scratch. Publishes “Ahead of AI” — monthly deep-dives.

Links: X @rasbt, Newsletter

François Chollet

Creator of Keras · ARC Prize

Creator of Keras and originator of the ARC benchmark. Challenges hype with rigorous thinking.

Links: X @fchollet

Jeremy Howard

Co-founder · fast.ai

Made deep learning accessible through practical courses. Great practitioner perspective.

Links: X @jeremyphoward, fast.ai

Practitioners & Engineers

Ethan Mollick

Associate Professor · Wharton School

Best voice for grounded, practical takes on using AI at work. “One Useful Thing” is essential.

Links: X @emollick, Substack

Simon Willison

Creator of Datasette · Django co-creator

Best real-time commentary on new AI tool releases. Daily experiments with LLMs.

Links: X @simonw, Blog

Shawn Wang (swyx)

Co-founder · Latent Space

Runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast. Focused on what engineers building with AI need to know.

Links: X @swyx, Latent Space

Nathan Lambert

Research Scientist · Allen Institute for AI

Clearest voice on RLHF and open-source AI. Publishes “Interconnects” newsletter.

Links: X @natolambert, Interconnects

Industry Leaders

Sam Altman

CEO · OpenAI

Posts infrequently but meaningfully. Signals where OpenAI is heading.

Links: X @sama, Blog

Dario Amodei

CEO · Anthropic

Essential long-form writing on transformative AI. Safety-focused but pro-progress.

Links: X @darioamodei

Yann LeCun

Chief AI Scientist · Meta

Turing Award winner. Vocal contrarian on LLM capabilities. Keeps discourse honest.

Links: X @ylecun

Demis Hassabis

CEO · Google DeepMind

Posts about scientific applications of AI and long-term research. Nobel laureate.

Links: X @demishassabis

Newsletters

Daily Digests

The Rundown AI

Daily · Free · rundown.ai

Concise daily briefing on AI news, tools, research. Good starting point for beginners.

Daily Free

Ben's Bites

Daily · Free + Pro · bensbites.co

Tracks new AI product launches and research papers. Strong taste for signal vs noise.

Daily Free

TLDR AI

Daily · Free · tldr.tech/ai

Three-paragraph summaries of top AI stories. Highly scannable.

Daily Free

Weekly Deep-Dives

The Batch

Weekly · Free · deeplearning.ai/the-batch

Andrew Ng’s weekly newsletter. Covers research, industry news with genuine expertise.

Weekly Free

One Useful Thing

Weekly · Free · oneusefulthing.org

Ethan Mollick’s Substack. Practical, evidence-based. Best for using AI better.

Weekly Free

Latent Space

Weekly · Free · latent.space

For AI engineers. Deep dives into model releases, fine-tuning, infrastructure.

Weekly Free

Ahead of AI

Monthly · Free · magazine.sebastianraschka.com

Sebastian Raschka’s review of important AI/ML papers. Exceptionally educational.

Monthly Free

YouTube & Podcasts

YouTube Channels

Andrej Karpathy

Neural Networks: Zero to Hero

The definitive “build it from scratch” series on transformers. Essential viewing.

3Blue1Brown

Math & neural network visualisations

Grant Sanderson’s animations. Best visual introduction to deep learning.

Two Minute Papers

Research paper summaries

Fast way to know what’s been published. Covers CV, language models, generative AI.

AI Explained

Accessible deep-dives on major releases

Good for understanding what GPT-4, Claude, Gemini actually do differently.

Podcasts

Lex Fridman Podcast

Long-form interviews

Multi-hour conversations with researchers, founders, engineers across AI and robotics.

The Cognitive Revolution

AI applications in the real world

Focuses on where AI is actually having impact today. Best for “AI in production.”

Latent Space Podcast

AI engineering & infrastructure

Interviews with engineers building AI infrastructure. More technical.

No Priors

Founders & investors in AI

Sharp questions about where AI is heading commercially. Startup/venture perspective.

Dwarkesh Patel

Long-form research conversations

Extraordinary prep work. Guests include leading researchers and alignment experts.

Recommendation: Start with Ethan Mollick’s “One Useful Thing” for practical use, Andrej Karpathy’s YouTube to understand how models work, and The Batch for weekly news.