At a time when the words “AI” and “hype” have become almost synonymous, it’s crucial to be smart about choosing your sources of information. There is far too much information noise out there, and sifting through the sea of articles from various AI evangelists and generated garbage to find something truly worthwhile is incredibly difficult.

In this post, I’ll share the materials I read to stay up-to-date on the latest developments.

Blogs

A good blog is a gold nugget. Its signal-to-noise ratio approaches infinity. That’s why I’ll start with a list of blogs I find useful.

Simon Willison’s Weblog

If I were forced to give up all blogs but one, I would keep this one. Simon Willison, one of the creators of the Django web framework, is the gold standard of a technical blogger focusing on LLMs and other AI-related technologies. And for good reason—he constantly adds all the latest developments and features to his llm utility, from both cloud provider APIs and local inference libraries like Ollama. His blog features daily reviews of new models 1, tips for developers using AI in their work, links to interesting news from other blogs, and much more.

Besides AI, Simon also covers news from the world of Python, JS, and Web technologies.

The Batch

The Batch is a weekly newsletter curated by Andrew Ng, the creator of the most popular and accessible courses on machine learning, deep learning, and Generative AI. In addition to the author’s column, the emails contain an analysis of the most important news from the world of artificial intelligence over the past week.

In addition to the newsletter, The Batch publishes notes on the application of AI in business, the latest scientific publications, and the impact of AI on society.

Ahead of AI and The Sequence

If you want to delve into the bleeding edge and state-of-the-art, it’s hard to find a better place than Sebastian Raschka’s blog. The author, a PhD who straddles industry and academia, regularly breaks down the most important publications and concepts, presenting them to the public in a relatively simple language accessible to anyone who understands algorithms and code.

Obviously, a blog of such quality cannot be updated frequently, while new scientific papers are published daily. For those who want more regular updates on the latest research, I recommend The Sequence. Their “The Sequence Radar” contains brief overviews of the most interesting publications. The rest of their material, available only by subscription, contains more detailed article breakdowns and analysis.

One Useful Thing

One Useful Thing offers a view of AI from academia, but from a different angle. Dr. Ethan Mollick, as a professor of management at the Wharton School, is primarily interested in how modern AI affects processes in education, business, medicine, and other fields. His main message is that whatever you do, you should “invite AI to the table.” This will help you map the contours of the Jagged Frontier 2 in the tasks that matter to you.

In addition to his sporadically updated blog, Dr. Mollick has written the book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, which, though slightly outdated in the rapidly changing world of AI, is still relevant as it touches on timeless questions about human-AI interaction in the workplace.

I also highly recommend following him on x.com. His posts on the platform are a mix of amusing experiments with the latest models, brief reviews of publications related to his field of interest, and general reflections on progress.

Import AI

Another weekly newsletter, this time from Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic and former Policy Director at OpenAI. As one would expect from someone with his background, his newsletters focus primarily on AI Safety, ethics, and regulation, although they also include technical notes.

At the end of each email, you’ll find a well-written science fiction vignette, often echoing the general theme of the news discussed. Sometimes I even wish he wrote books professionally.

AI Snake Oil

And now for something completely different. Professors Arvind Narayanan and his co-author, PhD candidate Sayash Kapoor, would be called AI skeptics by many today. However, their approach is significantly deeper than that of a typical denier. The authors view AI through the lens of a classic technology and raise questions about its application and regulation from that perspective. They emphasize that approaches assuming AI is a deus ex machina can be harmful if it is, in fact, a conventional—albeit very powerful—general-purpose technology. At the same time, they acknowledge and affirm the practical benefits that AI already provides. Their material is a kind of a red pill in a world of hype and inflated expectations.

Deep Research

Besides the blogs mentioned above, which I read via good old RSS and, in the case of Substack-based ones, through email newsletters, I also generate a personal daily digest for myself using Gemini 2.5 Pro with Deep Research. You could use similar tools from competitors, but in my opinion, it’s Gemini that offers the best balance of breadth and depth of analysis.

Reading such a digest in the morning allows me to catch up on the most important news of the previous day if it hasn’t already been discussed in one of the blogs. If I don’t have time to read, I create a podcast using NotebookLM3 and listen to it on my way to the office.

You can find the prompt I use and a sample generated digest for June 14, 2025, at this link.

Where I don’t look

Here I’ll just list the sources I consciously ignore. In my opinion, life is too short to waste time on them:

  1. AI influencers on LinkedIn and other social networks. As a rule, this is absolute, blindingly white noise.
  2. e/acc and AI doomers. Philosophical debates can be interesting, but I prefer a more pragmatic approach.
  3. YouTube reviews. Worth watching only to learn the art of stretching five minutes of material into an hour-long video.

A Little About FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

And finally, a piece of advice for those who are constantly monitoring every possible source for fear of missing something important: relax. I once dismissed the arrival of ChatGPT as just another marketing gimmick. It was embarrassing, but nothing terrible happened.

If something truly important comes along, the sources listed above will not only let you know about it but also help you understand how it works, how to apply it, and how it will affect our lives. And the rest isn’t worth worrying about.

  1. With the mandatory pelicans on bicycles. ↩︎

  2. The phrase means that AI can excel at some tasks while failing spectacularly at others, and it’s impossible to determine which is which logically—only empirically. ↩︎

  3. It’s now conveniently integrated directly into the Gemini interface. ↩︎