Where the real-time knowledge actually lives. The field moves too fast for books; the places below move with it.
mindmap root((Where AI
actually happens)) Newsletters Import AI Latent Space Ben's Bites Interconnects The Batch AI Snake Oil Blogs Simon Willison Lilian Weng Sebastian Raschka Chip Huyen Jay Alammar Anthropic engineering OpenAI cookbook Communities r/LocalLLaMA Hacker News HF forums LangChain Discord MLOps Community Anthropic Discord AI Engineer community Events NeurIPS ICLR / ICML AI Engineer Summit Latent Space meetups Socials X AI researchers LinkedIn AI builders YouTube lab channels
If you read nothing else, read these.
1. Import AI — Jack Clark (ex-Anthropic policy co-founder) — https://jack-clark.net/ Weekly. Opinionated. Strong on policy, evals, and the broader AI ecosystem.
2. Latent Space — Swyx and Alessio — https://www.latent.space/ Practitioner-focused. Podcast and newsletter. Great for staying current on tooling, products, and the AI engineering craft.
3. Ben's Bites — Ben Tossell — https://www.bensbites.com/ Daily. Short. Good for five-minute mornings; skim for names and links, read the longer pieces as they interest you.
4. Interconnects — Nathan Lambert — https://www.interconnects.ai/ Strong on RLHF, open models, and post-training. A researcher's newsletter you can actually read without a PhD.
5. The Batch — DeepLearning.AI (Andrew Ng) — https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/ Weekly roundup. Friendly, slightly educational, broadly useful.
6. AI Snake Oil — Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor — https://www.aisnakeoil.com/ The essential counter-voice. Essential reading for staying calibrated against hype.
7. Last Week in AI — https://lastweekin.ai/ Weekly podcast + newsletter. Good for "I missed a week" catch-up.
Simon Willison — https://simonwillison.net/
The most reliable single feed in AI. Simon writes almost daily, with careful examples and clear, skeptical thinking. His llm CLI tool and tag-based archive are treasures.
Lilian Weng (ex-OpenAI research) — https://lilianweng.github.io/ Long-form, evergreen technical essays. Her posts on RLHF, agents, and LLM-powered autonomous agents are canonical.
Sebastian Raschka — https://sebastianraschka.com/ Fine-tuning, LoRA, and educational pieces written with an academic's care.
Chip Huyen — https://huyenchip.com/ AI systems and LLMOps. Her book Designing Machine Learning Systems is a must-own for anyone shipping AI.
Jay Alammar — https://jalammar.github.io/ The illustrated explainer for Transformers, BERT, GPT-2, and more. If you learn visually, this is home.
Anthropic Engineering — https://www.anthropic.com/engineering Short, highly practical posts. Building effective agents, Contextual Retrieval, and the agentic research system posts are must-reads.
OpenAI Cookbook — https://cookbook.openai.com/ Runnable examples for basically everything in the OpenAI API.
Hugging Face Blog — https://huggingface.co/blog Fine-tuning recipes, model releases, and deep dives.
Eugene Yan — https://eugeneyan.com/ Applied ML wisdom; especially strong on patterns, evals, and "what actually ships."
r/LocalLLaMA — https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA The beating heart of the open-weights community. Model releases, quantization tips, hardware, benchmarks. Noisy, essential.
Hacker News — https://news.ycombinator.com For everything else. Every major release, paper, and drama lands here first.
Hugging Face Forums & Discord — https://huggingface.co/ Friendly, technical, model-centric.
LangChain Discord — https://www.langchain.com/community Practitioner-heavy. Good for RAG, agents, and orchestration questions.
MLOps Community (Slack) — https://mlops.community/ The best free community for production ML and LLMOps.
AI Engineer Discord / Slack — https://www.ai.engineer/ Practitioner-focused. Close to the annual summits.
Anthropic Discord — linked from claude.com Claude- and API-focused. Active and useful.
AI Engineer Summit / World's Fair — https://www.ai.engineer/ The practitioner conference. Talks are short, dense, and recorded.
NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML The academic conferences. Even if you don't attend, the paper lists set the agenda for the next year.
LangChain Interrupt — https://interrupt.langchain.com/ Annual; focused on agents and LLM applications.
Regional AI meetups Search Luma or Meetup in your city. The signal-to-noise in in-person AI meetups in 2026 is excellent in SF, NYC, London, Bangalore, Singapore, and increasingly elsewhere.
X/Twitter is still, grudgingly, where AI Twitter happens. A minimal starter list of accounts that post signal, not noise:
On LinkedIn, follow the lab engineering accounts and a handful of builders in your specific industry.
On YouTube, subscribe to the channels in Appendix C.
flowchart LR
M[Monday
Skim weekend newsletters] --> T[Tuesday
One blog post deep read]
T --> W[Wednesday
Watch one video / talk]
W --> Th[Thursday
One Hacker News thread]
Th --> F[Friday
Read one paper abstract]
F --> Sa[Weekend
Tinker. Build. Ship.]
Thirty minutes a day. Less than you spend on Slack.
Back to index.