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Ask HN: Which sources cover AI developments without falling for the hype?
Popular press seems to do a bad job covering AI related developments. Twitter is too scattered and academic papers are too narrow.
So where do working professionals get seasoned and mature coverage of this space? What would be the AI equivalent of the Economist, AnandTech or Tom’s Hardware?
- cratermoon 3y agoAt this point it's better to look for specific people rather than a single source. Some suggestions Gary Marcus https://garymarcus.substack.com/ https://garymarcus.substack.com/ Temnit Gebru and Dr. Emily Bender https://www.dair-institute.org/ https://www.dair-institute.org/ Alex Hanna, Mystery AI Hype Theater: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417 Dr. Émile P. Torres: https://www.xriskology.com/ https://www.xriskology.com/
- latenightcoding 3y agoGary Marcus covers Gary Marcus
- LewisVerstappen 3y agolol all the sources you linked have consistently been wrong at prredictions over the last 2 years
- jatins 3y agoWhat makes Gary Marcus a "Leading expert on AI" (in his own words)?
- caesil 3y agoThese sources all fall for a very different kind of AI hype.
- comeonbro 3y agoHilarious answer
- tomalaci 3y agoMissing Elon Musk, guy is a leading authority on all things AI that even the British government asks what to do about it from him (big /s).
- throwaway4good 3y agoAnd the podcast guy that speaks really slowly ...
- jsemrau 3y agoSubstack ? AI Supremacy: https://bit.ly/3Qz8uNV https://bit.ly/3Qz8uNV Latent Space: https://bit.ly/469AAFd https://bit.ly/469AAFd Encyclopedia Autonomica: https://bit.ly/3FXlVlU https://bit.ly/3FXlVlU Deep Learning Focus: https://bit.ly/40Bi5bF https://bit.ly/40Bi5bF Artificial Fintelligence: https://bit.ly/3SxQNAZ https://bit.ly/3SxQNAZ
- lagrange77 3y agoWaiting for the obligatory saint, who answers with the actual URLs.
- jiayo 3y agoAI Supremacy: https://aisupremacy.substack.com/ https://aisupremacy.substack.com/ Latent Space: https://www.latent.space/ https://www.latent.space/ Encyclopedia Autonomica: https://jdsemrau.substack.com/ https://jdsemrau.substack.com/ Deep Learning Focus: https://cameronrwolfe.substack.com/ https://cameronrwolfe.substack.com/ Artifical Fintelligence: https://finbarrtimbers.substack.com/ https://finbarrtimbers.substack.com/
- throwaway4good 3y ago
- StableAlkyne 3y agoFollowing AI-related RSS feeds from the ML research arms of the big companies is nice. Not as hypey as the popular press, and you get more technical details. Most mail clients support RSS nowadays, so you can even get notified when a new post is made, instead of periodically checking on Mondays or something. IBM, Microsoft, Meta (I don't think they have RSS though), nVidia, OpenAI, Google, and IBM all have great blogs that cover their work. Another good resource is the YouTube channel "2-minute papers." It sometimes has a lot of hype, but it does a good job of showcasing recent work.
- brudgers 3y agoThe term "artificial intelligence" is intrinsically hype. That's why it is always a moving bar. Good luck.
- GaggiX 3y agoI think that when people accept that a machine can be intelligent, the goalpost will stop moving, but of course it will take time.
- nyokodo 3y ago> when people accept that a machine can be intelligent, the goalpost will stop moving The goalposts will stop moving when the terms used are precise. What does intelligence mean? If people agree on a precise definition then we’ll know when we’ve reached that artificially.
- GaggiX 3y agoThat would be difficult because intelligence is not black and white, so an arbitrary line should be decided, but at least everyone agrees that humans are intelligent. Maybe people will finally stop moving the goalpost when AI would be able to beat humans on every tasks.
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- hubraumhugo 3y agoI had the same problem, so I ended up classifying all HN posts because I believe HN is my most relevant and trustworthy source for tech news. Example: https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack/6194542d-2157-4e3c-8321-a43728423d36 https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack/6194542d-2157-4e3c-8321-a437... This was more of an experiment for a personalizable HN feed, but I'll fully productize it if there is enough interest.
- Michelangelo11 3y agoHey, this is really interesting. Out of curiosity -- I'm assuming you scrape the front page regularly, classify the posts, then sort them accordingly and do the summary and comment report via LLMs, right? In any case, I'm definitely interested in this and I can see myself using it fairly often.
- hubraumhugo 3y agoYeah that's pretty much how it works :) will launch this as Show HN soon.
- danielbln 3y agoThis is neat, the comment summary metrics are a nice touch. I'd use it.
- wheresmyshadow 3y agoOh man, I wish this thing had an RSS feed... would be perfect.
- hubraumhugo 3y agoWill add RSS, good idea!
- carlossouza 3y agohttps://trendingpapers.com/ https://trendingpapers.com/ Pure numbers: the top trending papers surface. They are a function of PageRank (citations and the importance of which papers cite each other), authors' previous body of work, etc... The filters help select a sub-area (NLP, Computer Vision, etc.) and slice what's really new (released over the last week, last 3 months, last 6, etc.). The tool is designed to solve this problem.
- svantana 3y agoThat's a good one, and in a similar vein there's https://paperswithcode.com/ https://paperswithcode.com/ from facebook/meta that tracks papers and their accompanying github repos, along with their benchmark results.
- lagrange77 3y agohttps://thegradient.pub/ https://thegradient.pub/ is not bad.
- modeless 3y agoTwitter is good but you have to filter it. Start by following AI researchers doing real work, not pundits. However that's not enough by itself. It is essential to use the "mute words" feature to aggressively prune any and all tweets about politics and other crap. You're left with a much denser stream of people's informed thoughts about the latest research as it comes out.
- simonw 3y agoI've been trying to do this on my blog. Here's my AI tag: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai/
- lagrange77 3y agoI really like your blog!
- Michelangelo11 3y agoFWIW, and to answer the OP's question, I think yours and Ethan Mollick's blogs and social media accounts are the best sources for AI news right now. I've been trying to find more sources myself and, other than a few good but highly technical ones that don't focus on actual LLM use (e.g. Jeremy Howard), have bern coming up short.
- brianjking 3y agoYou, Ethan, & swyx are fantastic.
- swyx 3y agothank you so much! indeed trying to keep a level head on while the world goes nuts, and consciously missing out on the social media dopamine by not endorsing every little thing as lifechanging. gotta say the creator incentives arent set up to encourage it, I think all 3 of us purely do it for love of the game rather than making any serious money from our work on this
- throw_d0156640 3y agoThanks for this! IMHO it's a bit wall-of-text (or maybe that's the weakened attention span). Ever considered present just headlines like a certain tech news site?
- simonw 3y agoYeah, that's a very reasonable improvement I should make. My homepage is modeled after https://daringfireball.net/ https://daringfireball.net/ and has been for the past 20-ish years, but it's time I redesigned that to better reflect my content I think.
- capableweb 3y agoI was looking for something similar as well since the initial SD launch. But I've ended up just using the HN frontpage as that, with good results. Most things end up here, even if not driven by hype, and the discussions that follow usually are "Good Enough" but with quite a bit of off-topic comments.
- jprete 3y agoI find Zvi Mowshowitz to be the best source available (https://thezvi.substack.com/ https://thezvi.substack.com/). He’s in the X-risk camp (and so am I) but seems to have a clear view of some AI things being exciting, others being dangerous, and still others being irrelevant. I don’t trust most AI-positive sources because they almost never have anything negative to say at all, so they’re clearly in it to hype AI and not to inform anyone of true things. I don’t trust Gary Marcus’s opinion for a similar reason.
- ShamelessC 3y agoX-risk camp?
- munchler 3y agoExistential risk, I think. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/existential-risk https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/existential-risk
- ShamelessC 3y agoAh so like a Yudkowsky type then? I don't want to lump them all into the same category, but since "X-risk" is given as a category I would just say that they're likely all very well educated, and for some reason deeply deeply misguided by some sort of philosophical hunch that is not rooted in actual current research but in thought experiments. Yudkowsky tends not to respond well or at all to criticism either. For real just go see the criticisms written on that site about his views on runaway AGI and how we get "one critical chance" to stop it from killing us all. His response is effectively "this post is very long, could you summarize the best bits?" and then doesn't respond any further. Less on topic, I'm becoming convinced that lesswrong is where researchers who couldn't get published go to feel like they got published and peer reviewed, when in reality they are getting peer reviewed by a massive echo chamber. Even less on topic and potentially downvote-inciting; it looks less like an echo chamber and more like a sort of social-media-first cult every day.
- 3y ago
- pcf 3y agoI follow these on YouTube: * Matt Wolfe: https://www.youtube.com/@mreflow https://www.youtube.com/@mreflow * MattVidPro AI: https://www.youtube.com/@MattVidPro https://www.youtube.com/@MattVidPro * Two Minute Papers: https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers * Dr Alan D. Thompson: https://www.youtube.com/@DrAlanDThompson https://www.youtube.com/@DrAlanDThompson * Curious Refuge: https://www.youtube.com/@curiousrefuge https://www.youtube.com/@curiousrefuge
- ShamelessC 3y agoI can't speak for the others but Two Minute Papers' general format oozes hype. I realize that he tends to recap on exciting topics, but he also sometimes "falls for" research that won't actually pan out for practical reasons. He also tends to cover things in an intensely over-optimistic way ("WOW! WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE" on literally every video...) that would have you think every single subject is an absolute major breakthrough when the reality is that many of them simply produced cool-looking demos that look good in a youtube thumbnail. Sorry if that's too harsh. The channel isn't all bad. The title of the channel is up front about being a quick synopsis that you can watch from time to time to keep up with the latest updates. That's still useful for many people. But it probably won't work as a good _filter_ for what will and will not be quickly forgotten. In fairness (again), that's a _very_ difficult challenge to solve. It is however the premise of the Ask HN.
- kubiton 3y agoI watch him for a long time and he is just right. The progress on so many fields is fast. And a ton is already available to use. All the nerfs, most of Nvidia topics, etc. Or all the character animation stuff, those things are in games and in the industry. And even the few which show the direction make it very obvious were the road is going in the next 5-10 years. I'm honestly surprised that you think he is naive/to hyped. Alone the Nvidia ml denoiser and real time ray tracing is basically redefining graphs. We are in the middle of all of it.
- pixl97 3y agoCheck out this channel if you've not seen it before https://www.youtube.com/@aiexplained-official https://www.youtube.com/@aiexplained-official Also robert miles, though most of his videos are older at this time https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI
- ShamelessC 3y agoIn general, any new research from OpenAI that is subsequently quickly replicated by the actual open source community (e.g. Latent Consistency Models for a recent example). They have put out research that hasn't gone anywhere in the past - which is why I suggest waiting until the open source community or other AI startups start to copy them on that specific research. Another group that is important to watch is any of the members from the `CompVis` group that originally developed VQGAN and Latent Diffusion models. Although I'm uncertain how much of the team remains as many seem to have realized they can do more research (and make some more money) by working at the various research labs popping up.
- jfisher4024 3y agoSurprised no one has mentioned AK’s daily paper digest: https://huggingface.co/papers https://huggingface.co/papers He also posts summaries on Twitter, or at least he used to but my Twitter account is glitched and I can’t see Tweets anymore
- Jimmc414 3y agoAndrej Karpathy Simon Willison Ethan Mollick Riley Goodside Matthew Berman (for succinct howto's on YT)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jumploops 3y agoThe recent progress in “AI” is almost entirely due to advancements in large language models (LLMs). In some aspects the hype is real; LLMs are extraordinarily performant for a wide range of previously hard tasks. On the other hand, people seem to equate these advancements with “strong AI” (or AGI). We are one step closer, sure, but the calculator was also a step forward. We’ve created a mirror of all (most) human knowledge, queryable via natural language. People look into this mirror and see themselves, sometimes things greater than themselves. This mirror tricks us into thinking the machine will soon replace us. It’s so accurate, why would it not? Fortunately, it’s just a mirror, and we’re the bear in the woods seeing it’s reflection for the first time. Scared and ready to fight. If you focus on the technology (LLMs) and throw caution at anyone hyping “AI” generally, you can create a filter for what’s real and what should be questioned.
- kubiton 3y agoThere are research papers left and right. Stuff like certain architectures, reading LLM for promoting multi modal llms. Then we have stuff like insteuctgpt, ml models for robots, lots and lots of research from Nvidia for virtual simulation and transfer to real world, digital twin is also a relevant art in agi. Object detection is also much better and has nothing to do with llms. Segment anything from FB for example. Whisper and sd are also not LLM. There are a ton of puzzle peaces slowly falling in place left and right.
- pophenat 3y ago"There are a ton of puzzle peaces slowly falling in place left and right." Yet, we do not seem to have a very good understanding of how many pieces there are in the puzzle.
- kubiton 3y agoTrue. But I feel well entertained watching them fall. Like using them and experimenting around. But it also shows the road ahead quite clear. For example were is the money coming from? From millions of people paying for GitHub copilot for example. How is it sold? Per webui, API and cloud providers. Digital twin will also play a huge role in this as a bridge between AGI <> real world.
- reverse_no 3y agowell, given that industry people and “experts” confidently predicted that what has happened in 2023 could happen only hundreds of years from now or not at all… i would say that the “hype” has as much veracity as anything else. the simple fact os that no matter how carefully you curate your news, you will have no idea whats coming. and coming soon. most people havent wrapped their head around it yet but the plain and obvious truth is that technology, especially AI, must be slowed, paused, regulated in some way because too much change too fast is very dangerous. please dont comment about previous eras of technology and change. nothings even comes close to comparing
- theptip 3y agoZvi does a very detailed roundup of the weekly news, with an AI x-risk lens: https://thezvi.substack.com/ https://thezvi.substack.com/ Pretty thorough (though verbose) if you just want to stay on top of developments.
- thomasweiser 3y agohttps://simonwillison.net/ https://simonwillison.net/
- convexstrictly 3y agoHigh level AI developments: https://importai.substack.com/ https://importai.substack.com/ https://www.semianalysis.com/ https://www.semianalysis.com/ Hardware focused. Paywalled, but long article teasers contain plenty of information. Research Focused: https://codingwithintelligence.com/ https://codingwithintelligence.com/ https://dblalock.substack.com/ https://dblalock.substack.com/ https://twitter.com/arankomatsuzaki https://twitter.com/arankomatsuzaki
- roddylindsay 3y agoOn the AI policy side: https://aipoliticalpulse.substack.com/ https://aipoliticalpulse.substack.com/
- nothrowaways 3y agoReddit local llama
- Botir 3y ago[dead]
- unraveller 3y agoThose outlets cover mature industries. And as Charles Kettering tells us (inventor of the electric starter motor): "You can’t plan industries". Of course no one is yet out in front with the settled science to preach so just enjoy the chaos and behind the scenes look at the birth of an industry or use an aggregator. https://allainews.com https://allainews.com https://nuse.ai https://nuse.ai https://news.bensbites.co/newest https://news.bensbites.co/newest
- bbyford 3y agoAI ethics stuff mostly: https://www.machine-ethics.net https://www.machine-ethics.net