Resources

Foundations

The explainers that make everything after them click.

1. 1.Neural Networks: Zero to Hero · Andrej Karpathy. Builds a neural net, then a GPT, from scratch in code. The single best on-ramp there is.
2. 2.The Illustrated Transformer · Jay Alammar. The picture-first walkthrough of attention that most people first understood transformers from.
3. 3.The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks · Andrej Karpathy, 2015. The post that made a generation of engineers fall for sequence models.
4. 4.Understanding LSTM Networks · Christopher Olah, 2015. The canonical, diagram-driven explanation of how gated recurrent memory works.

Landmark Papers

Must reads.

1. 5.Attention Is All You Need · Ashish Vaswani et al., 2017. Introduced the transformer. The paper the modern era is built on.
2. 6.Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space · Tomas Mikolov et al. (Google), 2013. Word2Vec. Showed words could be turned into meaningful vectors, the root of embeddings.
3. 7.Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training · Alec Radford et al. (OpenAI), 2018. GPT-1. First showed pre-train then fine-tune on a transformer.
4. 8.BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding · Jacob Devlin et al. (Google), 2018. The bidirectional encoder that dominated NLP benchmarks before the GPT line pulled ahead.
5. 9.Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners · Alec Radford et al. (OpenAI), 2019. GPT-2. Scaled the idea up and hinted at zero-shot ability.
6. 10.Language Models are Few-Shot Learners · Tom Brown et al. (OpenAI), 2020. GPT-3. The one that showed scale alone unlocks new behaviour.
7. 11.ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks · Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, 2012. AlexNet. The result that set off the modern deep-learning era.
8. 12.Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks · Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, 2014. Seq2Seq. The encoder-decoder idea that set the path toward modern language models.
9. 13.Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition · Kaiming He et al., 2015. ResNet. Made truly deep networks trainable and reset the field.
10. 14.Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback · Long Ouyang et al. (OpenAI), 2022. InstructGPT. The RLHF recipe that turned raw models into assistants.

Courses

If you want to go from reading to doing.

1. 15.Practical Deep Learning for Coders · fast.ai. Top-down and hands-on. Ship a working model in the first lesson.
2. 16.CS231n: Deep Learning for Computer Vision · Stanford. The course Karpathy designed. Still the gold standard for the fundamentals.
3. 17.CS224n: NLP with Deep Learning · Stanford. The rigorous path through language models, from embeddings up.
4. 18.Machine Learning Specialization · Andrew Ng · DeepLearning.AI. The gentlest on-ramp to the maths and intuitions underneath it all.

Watch & Listen

Talks, channels, and podcasts. Sit back and let someone explain it.

1. 19.Neural Networks (series) · 3Blue1Brown. The most beautiful visual intuition for what a network actually does.
2. 20.[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models · Andrej Karpathy, 2023. The clearest one-hour mental model of how LLMs work and where they go.
3. 21.Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code · Andrej Karpathy. Watch a GPT get built line by line. Everything demystifies at once.
4. 22.AI Explained · YouTube channel. Calm, careful breakdowns of every major model release and benchmark.
5. 23.Theo — t3.gg · YouTube channel. Opinionated, fast-moving takes on AI coding tools and how they change the work.
6. 24.Prof G Markets · Scott Galloway · YouTube channel. The business and money side of the AI boom, markets, valuations, and who's winning.
7. 25.YC Paper Club · Y Combinator. Researchers and founders break down the latest AI papers. A great way to keep up.
8. 26.AI Engineer · swyx & the AI Engineer team. Talks from the AI Engineer conferences. Practitioners showing what they actually shipped.
9. 27.Dwarkesh Podcast · Dwarkesh Patel. Deeply researched, unusually hard questions for the people building frontier AI.
10. 28.Latent Space · Shawn Wang (swyx) & Alessio Fanelli. The AI engineer's trade publication in audio form. Real implementation, not hype.
11. 29.No Priors · Sarah Guo & Elad Gil. Frontier AI from the investor and product-builder angle. Where the field is heading.
12. 30.Lex Fridman Podcast · Lex Fridman. Long, unhurried conversations with many of the field's defining figures.
13. 31.The 80,000 Hours Podcast · Rob Wiblin & team. In-depth interviews on AI safety and the field's biggest risks, now on video.
14. 32.TLDR News · TLDR News. Concise, plain explainers on the day's politics, tech, and economics.
15. 33.TLDR News Global · TLDR News. The global-affairs channel, for stories beyond the UK and US.
16. 34.TLDR News EU · TLDR News. The European politics and policy channel from the same team.

Tools & Products

The AI products worth actually using, across code, writing, and media.

1. 35.Cursor · Anysphere. The AI-native code editor most developers reach for first.
2. 36.Claude Code · Anthropic. Anthropic's terminal coding agent, the pick for serious work.
3. 37.Codex · OpenAI. OpenAI's coding agent, in the terminal, IDE, and the cloud.
4. 38.Devin · Cognition. Autonomous software engineer that plans and ships code on its own.
5. 39.v0 · Vercel. Generates working web apps and UI from a prompt.
6. 40.Lovable · Lovable. Prompt-to-app builder for shipping full prototypes fast.
7. 41.Base44 · Wix. No-code app builder that grew to a Wix acquisition in six months.
8. 42.Perplexity · Perplexity AI. AI answer engine that cites its sources as it searches.
9. 43.Exa · Exa AI. Search API that gives AI agents real-time, structured web data.
10. 44.Granola · Granola. AI meeting notes that transcribe your calls without a bot joining.
11. 45.NotebookLM · Google. Grounds answers in your own documents, and turns them into audio.
12. 46.Whisper · OpenAI. The open speech-to-text model much of the ecosystem is built on.
13. 47.ElevenLabs · ElevenLabs. The leading text-to-speech and voice-cloning platform.
14. 48.Suno · Suno. Generates complete songs, vocals and all, from a text prompt.
15. 49.Runway · Runway. AI video generation and editing tools for creative work.
16. 50.Midjourney · Midjourney. Still the benchmark for aesthetic AI image generation.

Evals & Dev Tooling

Where to see who's actually ahead, and what to build and monitor with.

1. 51.LMArena · LMArena (ex-LMSYS). Crowdsourced head-to-head voting that ranks models by human preference.
2. 52.Artificial Analysis · Artificial Analysis. Independent leaderboards comparing models on intelligence, speed, and price.
3. 53.SWE-bench · SWE-bench. The standard test of whether agents can fix real GitHub issues.
4. 54.Epoch AI · Epoch AI. Research and data on AI trends, compute, and where the frontier is heading.
5. 55.Hugging Face · Hugging Face. The hub for open models and datasets, and home to many leaderboards.
6. 56.LangChain · LangChain. Agent framework (LangGraph) plus LangSmith for tracing and evals.
7. 57.Langfuse · Langfuse. Open-source observability and evals for LLM apps. Now part of ClickHouse.
8. 58.Weights & Biases · Weights & Biases. Experiment tracking and model tooling, widely used across ML teams.

People to Follow

Track these and you'll never fall too far behind. Follow a few on X and you'll feel the field move in real time.

1. 59.Andrej Karpathy · @karpathy · Anthropic (ex-OpenAI, ex-Tesla). The field's best teacher. Read and watch everything he makes.
2. 60.Sam Altman · @sama · OpenAI. OpenAI's CEO. Sets expectations for the field one post at a time.
3. 61.Elon Musk · @elonmusk · xAI. Runs xAI, and X itself. Unavoidable, for better and worse.
4. 62.Dario Amodei · @DarioAmodei · Anthropic. Anthropic's CEO. His long essays on scaling and safety set the terms of the debate.
5. 63.Demis Hassabis · @demishassabis · Google DeepMind. Frontier research and the science applications, from AlphaFold to Gemini.
6. 64.Greg Brockman · @gdb · OpenAI. OpenAI's president. Infrastructure scale, demos, and engineering culture.
7. 65.Yann LeCun · @ylecun · Turing laureate. Turing laureate and the field's most reliable contrarian on LLMs.
8. 66.Alexandr Wang · @alexandr_wang · Meta. Founded Scale AI, now Meta's Chief AI Officer leading its superintelligence push.
9. 67.Jack Clark · Anthropic. His Import AI newsletter is the most trusted weekly read on where the field is going.
10. 68.Lilian Weng · Ex-OpenAI. Deep, survey-grade posts that become the reference on their topic.
11. 69.Simon Willison · Independent. The most reliable running commentary on what's actually new and useful.
12. 70.Christopher Olah · Anthropic. Makes the inside of neural networks legible. Pioneer of interpretability.

Frontier AI Labs

Who's building the models, grouped by region and in no particular order. As of Aug 2026.

Hyperscalers, Neoclouds & Compute

The clouds and chips the models actually run on.