What to Read & Watch
The reading (and watching) list for serious AI operators.
The Signal - our own brief - plus the newsletters, X accounts, YouTube channels, and videos our network actually reads and watches.
The Signal
The Signal - our weekly AI brief.
The Signal is our free weekly note on what's actually moving in AI for operators.
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- Weekly roundup of what mattered, not what trended
- Practical takes on new models, tools, and launches
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Newsletters
The best AI newsletters.
Curated picks from our network.
The Rundown AI
therundown.ai
Daily 5-minute briefing on the most important AI news, tools, and use cases. Best starting point for execs.
TLDR AI
tldr.tech/ai
Byte-sized daily AI newsletter with a sharp engineering and product slant. Covers the launches, papers, and code operators actually care about.
Ben's Bites
bensbites.com
Short, opinionated daily roundup of practical AI launches and what they actually mean for builders.
The Batch
deeplearning.ai/thebatch
Andrew Ng's weekly overview of what mattered in AI. Excellent signal-to-noise ratio for practitioners and business leaders.
One Useful Thing
Ethan Mollick
Wharton professor's practical experiments with AI in real work. Best signal-to-noise on how to actually use these tools.
Import AI
Jack Clark
Weekly deep-dive on frontier research, policy, and what's coming next from Anthropic co-founder. The thinking exec's read.
8 more newsletters
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One email a week. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
X Accounts
The best AI accounts on X.
Curated picks from our network.
Ethan Mollick
@emollick
Wharton professor running live experiments on how AI changes knowledge work. The single best follow for non-technical execs.
Andrej Karpathy
@karpathy
Former Tesla / OpenAI. Explains the frontier in plain language better than anyone else building it.
Andrew Ng
@AndrewYNg
DeepLearning.AI founder and one of AI's most influential educators. Exceptional at translating frontier research for practitioners.
Yann LeCun
@ylecun
Meta's Chief AI Scientist. Contrarian views on AGI timelines. The most credentialed skeptic of the mainstream AI narrative.
Sam Altman
@sama
OpenAI CEO. Signal on where the frontier lab thinks the world is going (read with appropriate calibration).
Dario Amodei
@DarioAmodei
Anthropic CEO. Thoughtful long-form essays on capability, safety, and the economic stakes.
7 more X accounts
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YouTube Channels
The best AI channels on YouTube.
Channels our network subscribes to.
Andrej Karpathy
@AndrejKarpathy
Gold standard for LLM internals. Builds neural networks from scratch in multi-hour walkthroughs. "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero" is essential viewing.
3Blue1Brown
@3blue1brown
Animated mathematical intuition for neural networks and transformers. Best visual explanation of how AI actually works at a conceptual level.
Matt Wolfe
@mreflow
Most reliable single source for weekly AI news and tool reviews. Accessible, genuine, and widely trusted for staying on top of the tool landscape.
DeepLearning.AI
@Deeplearningai
Andrew Ng's channel. Expert interviews, short courses, and explainers on key AI concepts. Trusted by millions of practitioners.
Two Minute Papers
@TwoMinutePapers
5–7 minute animated breakdowns of cutting-edge AI papers. Makes frontier research accessible without requiring a PhD.
Lex Fridman
@lexfridman
Long-form conversations with the people building and studying AI: Hinton, Altman, Amodei, LeCun, Karpathy, and more. Essential signal from the frontier.
4 more YouTube channels
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Drop your email to unlock the rest and get The Signal, our weekly AI brief, in your inbox.
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Communities
Forums and communities worth joining.
Curated picks from our network.
r/LocalLLaMA
reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA
The most practical engineering forum for running, fine-tuning, and deploying LLMs locally and on private infrastructure.
r/MachineLearning
reddit.com/r/MachineLearning
The academic hub for ML research papers, implementation questions, and practitioner commentary on the frontier.
r/AI_Agents
reddit.com/r/AI_Agents
Focused on building autonomous agents, multi-agent workflows, tool use, and production agentic systems.
r/AnthropicClaude
reddit.com/r/AnthropicClaude
Claude-specific prompts, API engineering, and use-case discussions from the most active Claude practitioner community.
r/PromptEngineering
reddit.com/r/PromptEngineering
The craft of prompting: frameworks, techniques, and real-world examples for getting the most out of any model.
r/LLMDevs
reddit.com/r/LLMDevs
LLM application development, RAG architecture, evals, and production systems for builders shipping AI features.
6 more communities
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Hall of Fame
The most highly rated posts and most watched videos.
The handful of pieces our network keeps coming back to.
Top Posts
Hall of Fame, posts.
Pieces our network keeps coming back to.
The Bitter Lesson
Rich Sutton, incompleteideas.net
The single most-cited essay on why compute and scale keep winning. Required reading before any AI strategy meeting.
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing
The most practical framework for executives on how to actually integrate LLMs into knowledge work.
Situational Awareness
Leopold Aschenbrenner, situational-awareness.ai
The essay that reframed the AGI timeline conversation in boardrooms. Long, but worth the afternoon.
Building effective agents
Anthropic, anthropic.com
The canonical guide on when to use workflows vs agents. Saves teams months of bad architecture decisions.
Machines of Loving Grace
Dario Amodei, darioamodei.com
Anthropic's CEO lays out what a world with powerful AI could look like for biology, health, and economic development. The optimistic counterweight.
Prompt Engineering Guide
Lilian Weng, lilianweng.github.io
The reference doc your engineering team should bookmark. Dense, practical, and regularly updated.
1 more top posts
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Top Videos
Hall of Fame, videos.
Pieces our network keeps coming back to.
Intro to Large Language Models
Andrej Karpathy, YouTube
The one-hour primer to send to your board before your next AI strategy session. The best single video for understanding what LLMs are and aren't.
Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code
Andrej Karpathy, YouTube
The single best video on how transformers actually work. Watch it once and you'll never be confused in a vendor pitch again.
But what is a neural network?
3Blue1Brown, YouTube
The most beautiful visual explanation of how neural networks work. No code required. Start here before anything technical.
Visualizing Attention, a Transformer's Heart
3Blue1Brown, YouTube
Explains the attention mechanism that powers every modern LLM - animated, intuitive, and the best 27 minutes you can spend understanding why these models work.
How AI Could Empower Any Business
Andrew Ng, TED
Why every company - not just tech companies - can build with AI. The talk to send skeptical executives.
State of GPT
Andrej Karpathy (Microsoft Build), YouTube
How models are actually trained and used in production. Still the clearest talk on the full training pipeline.
2 more top videos
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