10 ms·

How I keep up with AI progress

284 points by itzlambda 1y ago

j_timberlake 1y ago
Gwern used to be great to follow, but he fell off hard. His ego doesn't match his (known) accomplishments, and he hasn't had anything original to say in awhile. RIP Gwern and Google+.
muglug 1y ago
Just follow the first bullet point (read simonw's blog) and you'll probably be fine.
- dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
  Too lazy for that, a Fireship accompanying the morning coffee must suffice.
- krat0sprakhar 1y ago
  +1 - super high quality and almost no clickbait
  - bzmrgonz 1y ago
    not to mention that soothing roller coaster voice of his!! hahaha.
pamelafox 1y ago
Great list! I also subscribe to Gergeley Orosz' "Pragmatic Engineer" which covers many AI topics now, and to Gary Marcus' substack, which tackles topics more from an LLM skeptic perspective. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/ https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/ https://substack.com/@garymarcus https://substack.com/@garymarcus Plus I subscribe to updates from Python packages like Langchain and PydanticAI to see what they're up to, since that's usually reflective of what's happening in broader industry. I'm not on X anymore so I can't follow many of the folks directly, but some of them (like Simon Willison) also post on BlueSky and Mastodon, fortunately. Some folks like Sebastian Raschka and Chip Huyen also post on LinkedIn. Kind of all over, but eventually, I see a good amount of what's happening.
jameslk 1y ago
Maybe I’ve been missing some important stuff, but it seems the most relevant and important updates eventually just bubble up to the front page of HN or get mentioned in the comments
- mettamage 1y ago
  This is my attitude for all tech surrounding IT
  - gerdesj 1y ago
    Expert Systems looked really cool back in the '80s. Doctors would become a thing of the past etc etc. It seemed so obvious - codify knowledge and then ask it questions. Profit! This time the expert systems generate themselves over vast fields of everything by reading Facebook, Reddit and the rest of the internet that they can find. On that rather shaky basis the next "leap" in AI will be around 2070. Perhaps that one will create AGI or something that looks more like it.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Trying to keep up is like jumping on a 90mph treadmill. I have decided to opt out. I think AI (and currently LLMs) is more than a fad and not going away but it's in a huge state of churn right now. I'm not investing a ton of time into anything until I have to. In another few years the landscape will hopefully be more clear. Or not, but at least I won't have spent a lot of time on stuff that has quickly become irrelevant. I'm currently not using AI or LLMs in any of my day-to-day work.
  - HellDunkel 1y ago
    This. When has early adoptation paid off lately? Remember prompt engineering?
    - Disposal8433 1y ago
      I remember the same FOMO that happened with "Google searching." People wrote and sold books about how to search properly on Google. The same with AI will happen: either it will flop, or we'll be able to learn all the needed skills in a few days. I don't worry about it.
kybernetikos 1y ago
The big question for me at the moment is whether to go pay-for-tool or pay-for-model. If I pay for a tool that includes access to frontier models, then they'll keep the models up to date over time for me, let me use models from multiple providers, and the tool is carefully designed around the capabilities and limitations of the models it works with. On the other hand I can't really use the powerful model the tool works with for other applications or write my own. If I pay for models, then I can only really use it with that manufacturers tools or tools that aren't optimised for the model but allow you to bring your own keys, and if the model provider I'm paying falls behind then I'm tied in for the duration of the contract. The big advantage is that there is a lot of innovation in tooling happening at the moment and you can avoid being locked out of that or having to pay many times for access to the same frontier models accross multiple different tools.
- lumost 1y ago
  I think we'll see a shift to BYO LLM in the future. I saw that overleaf offers an assistant feature and an associated subscription. But I already pay for ChatGPT and Github copilot, I'm not going to pay for a third assistant - particularly when I can just bypass overleaf and use copilot in vscode directly.
  - kybernetikos 1y ago
    I think commercially there'll be a really strong pull for dev tools to resell access to frontier models. It's hard to make money out of dev tools, but if you tie in a service people are prepared to pay hundreds of dollars a month for, then suddenly it looks easier to make money out of an otherwise unsaleable IDE plugin that accesses that service.
    - vunderba 1y ago
      Yeah, Raycast and Warp are two tools that are definitely trying to do this.
  - smarx007 1y ago
    I think Github already offers BYOK (bring your own key). I think the problem is that you are still expected to pay for all the premium subs, the key only allows you to go above the rate/monthly limits. I think Jetbrains does it better with a full BYOM for models, including ollama. And I think if you go for ollama, you only need to pay for the IDE license, not for the AI add-on but don't quote me on that.
twapi 1y ago
Simon Willison's weblog is almost enough, highest S/N
- desertmonad 1y ago
  ^ https://simonwillison.net https://simonwillison.net
- baal80spam 1y ago
  And thankfully, he has an RSS!
- password4321 1y ago
  You can "you can pay [Simon] to send you less" ($10+ GitHub sponsor) > intended to be a ten minute read that catches you up on the most important developments from the past month in LLMs https://simonwillison.net/about/ https://simonwillison.net/about/
  - jononor 1y ago
    Ahahaha, that is legit a nice framing and "business model" for a Patreon in the AI space. Drinking from the firehose and washpanning it, so that not everyone has to do the same.
reactordev 1y ago
Andrej's talks have helped me tremendously. They're up on YT [0]. For a long time I used to mentor and help machine learning scientists but when I hear Andrej speak, it's like I'm the student without any knowledge. It was a really strange feeling at first but I've come to value so much. I'm Jon Snow. I know Nothing (compared to Andrej). [0] https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy
n8cpdx 1y ago
Article does not make the case for why you must keep up. AFAICT the best strategy would have been to completely tune out AI for the last ~3 years: - AI has not meaningfully improved productivity (unless you’re doing something super basic like react and were already bad at it). If you are using AI in a transformative way, that looks different today than it did 6 months ago. - AI has not stolen jobs (end of ZIRP did that) - The field changes so fast that you could completely tune out, and at any moment become up-to-date because the news from 3 months ago is irrelevant. I don’t get where this meme that “you have to keep up” comes from. You have agency. You can get off the treadmill. You will be fine.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  I have been tuning out for the last ~3 years and unfortunately it hasn't been the best strategy because the hype is still running roughshod all over me It is very likely my employer will use my AI apathy as an excuse to include me in the next round of layoffs, compared to my coworkers that are very AI enthusiastic
  - scellus 1y ago
    Maybe that would even be justified, if you are a software developer? If not now, at least soon. Imagine a software developer who refuses to use IDEs, or any kind of editor beyond sed, or version control, or some other essential tool. AI is soon similar, except in rare niche cases.
    - sshine 1y ago
      I've met many people smarter than myself who object to all of those. One professor thought syntax highlighting was a distraction. Lots of colleagues used vim/helix instead of IDEs. I haven't met anyone who refused version control from an intelligent standpoint. The most reasonable objection to AI from people who don't hate it are: I just don't know how it could help me; it's not as skilled as me at my job, and I'm already doing fine.
    - hagbarth 1y ago
lsy 1y ago
If you have a decent understanding of how LLMs work (you put in basically every piece of text you can find, get a statistical machine that models text really well, then use contractors to train it to model text in conversational form), then you probably don't need to consume a big diet of ongoing output from PR people, bloggers, thought leaders, and internet rationalists. That seems likely to get you going down some millenarian path that's not helpful. Despite the feeling that it's a fast-moving field, most of the differences in actual models over the last years are in degree and not kind, and the majority of ongoing work is in tooling and integrations, which you can probably keep up with as it seems useful for your work. Remembering that it's a model of text and is ungrounded goes a long way to discerning what kinds of work it's useful for (where verification of output is either straightforward or unnecessary), and what kinds of work it's not useful for.
- thorum 1y ago
  Beyond a basic understanding of how LLMs work, I find most LLM news fits into one of these categories: - Someone made a slightly different tool for using LLMs (may or may not be useful depending on whether existing tools meet your needs) - Someone made a model that is incrementally better at something, beating the previous state-of-the-art by a few % points on one benchmark or another (interesting to keep an eye on, but remember that this happens all the time and this new model will be outdated in a few months - probably no one will care about Kimi-K2 or GPT 4.1 by next January) I think most people can comfortably ignore that kind of news and it wouldn’t matter. On the other hand, some LLM news is: - Someone figured out how to give a model entirely new capabilities. Examples: RL and chain of thought. Coding agents that actually sort of work now. Computer Use. True end-to-end multimodal modals. Intelligent tool use. Most people probably should be paying attention to those developments (and trying to look forward to what’s coming next). But the big capability leaps are rare and exciting enough that a cursory skim of HN posts with >500 points should keep you up-to-date. I’d argue that, as with other tech skills, the best way to develop your understanding of LLMs and their capabilities is not through blogs or videos etc. It’s to build something. Experience for yourself what the tools are capable of, what does and doesn’t work, what is directly useful to your own work, etc.
  - 1y ago
blactuary 1y ago
Actually no I do not have to keep up
- paul7986 1y ago
  Indeed just get out of tech and make a new living! Tech jobs are declining and will continue then fall off a cliff with one doing the job ten use to. Followed by other white collar and blue collar (AMazons warehouse robots) jobs. Happily canceled my GPT Plus this week; personally not gonna feed that beast any longer! As well it can not generate maps (create road trip travel maps showing distance between locations to share with friends, a creek tubing map route & etc) at all like Gemini can for free.
  - astrange 1y ago
    > Tech jobs are declining and will continue then fall off a cliff with one doing the job ten use to. This would increase employment ceteris paribus. That's like saying inventing new programming languages is bad because they're too productive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    - kybernetikos 1y ago
      >> one doing the job ten use to. > This would increase employment ceteris paribus. This might be true, but if it is, the one "doing the job ten use[d] to" would not actually being doing the same kind of work at all, and so therefore might not be the same people or even same kind of people. Even if we do Jevons ourselves out of this situation, it might still spell employment disaster for mid level coders, while increasing employment for product managers.
      - astrange 1y ago
        Indeed that's the case, but it's sort of what software engineers signed up for anyway. I don't know if people are expecting to go their whole careers without learning a new stack / language. Maybe they are?
phyzome 1y ago
The article doesn't actually explain the "why", which severely undercuts the existence of the "how" list. It's fine to go do other things with your precious time instead.
- pizzathyme 1y ago
  Exactly. I have been questioning the need to "keep up". As the best AI innovations arrive, the ones that are useful will eventually make their way to the mainstream (and me). I didn't "keep up" with the nascent development of spreadsheets or Google Docs. Once they were widely used, I adopted them just fine, and haven't missed out on anything. Unless you are building an AI startup furiously searching for PMF before your runway expires, I don't see the urgency.
  - gowld 1y ago
    Someone who keeps up on AI and finds productivity gains will outcompete someone who doesn't, even for activities that aren't develoing new AI weren't AI-based before. What is an "AI startup"? If you add a chatbot do your product, are you an "AI startup"? Does "startup" require having no moat? Can you be an established stable business that loses everything to a startup that leapfrogs your tech, AltaVista?
    - _se 1y ago
      Or, they'll waste their time on trivial nonsense and get nothing useful done. Which is seeming more and more likely every day.
    - itsafarqueue 1y ago
      Every startup is now an AI startup.
linsomniac 1y ago
Here's my current rule of thumb: If you have successfully built a couple projects using agentic tooling and Claude 4 or similar models: you are doing a fine job of keeping up. Otherwise, you are at least a generation behind.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Behind what? Isn't the whole promise of AI tools that they just work? What skill am I missing out on learning, exactly, by not using them right now? Prompt Engineering? I think I'm a reasonably good communicator in both voice and text, so what skill am I failing to train by not using LLMs right now?
  - linsomniac 1y ago
    >Isn't the whole promise of AI tools that they just work? No, not at all. Like with pretty much any development tool, you need to get proficient with them. >what skill am I missing out on At this point, it seems like pretty much all of them related to generative AI. But, the most recent of them that I'll point at is: tooling tooling tooling, and prompting. But the specific answer (to answer your "exactly") is going to depend on you and what problems you are solving. That's why on tries not to fall behind, so you can see how to use tooling in a rapidly evolving landscape, for your exact circumstances. >I think I'm a reasonably good communicator in both voice and text, so what skill am I failing to train by not using LLMs right now? You know how to achieve something you will use different words with different people? You don't talk to your spouse the same way you talk to your parents or your children or your friends or your coworkers, right? You understand that if you are familiar with someone you speak to them differently if you want to achieve something, yes?
    - dingnuts 1y ago
      this is just ridiculous. you can get up to speed with SOTA tooling in a few hours. A system prompt is just a prompt that runs every time. Tool calls are just patterns that are fine tuned into place so that we can parse specific types of LLM output with traditional software. Agents are just a LLM REPL with a context specific system prompt, and limited ability to execute commands none of this stuff is complicated, and the models themselves have been basically the same since GPT-2 was released years ago
codebolt 1y ago
Just subscribing to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google on YouTube is pretty helpful. They post demos of all major new feature releases that are good to skim through to get a sense of where the frontier is moving (just take all claims about capabilities with a grain of salt). I've also got some gems from Microsofts Build talks, specifically whenever Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich get together, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIFDVOXMNDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIFDVOXMNDc
nice_byte 1y ago
Doesn't explain the "why you must too" part
tezza 1y ago
Add to the list: https://x.com/rowancheung https://x.com/rowancheung - Rowan Cheung: “Daily” updates and insider access
School-Cotton 1y ago
> and why you must too No, I don't think I do. Been working great for me so far.
deadbabe 1y ago
Don’t you ever let people make you think you have to tirelessly follow some tech progress or stay on top of things all the time. Progress is like a bus. You can just get on board at any time. You’re not going to fall behind. And staying up to date doesn't keep you “ahead” of anyone. Doing things is what gets you ahead, and if you don’t feel like doing something right now, don’t worry about, do something later, and you’ll be ahead of people who aren’t doing anything at that moment.
scellus 1y ago
If one wants to follow AI development mostly in the sense of LLMs and associated frontier models, that's an excellent list with over half of the names familiar, to whom I have converged independently. I have a list in X for AI; it's the best source of information overall on the subject, although some podcasts or RSS feeds directly from the long-form writers would be quite close. (If one is a researcher themselves, then of course it's a must to follow the paper feeds, not commentary or secondary references.) I'd add https://epoch.ai https://epoch.ai to the list, on podcasts at least Dwarkesh Patel; on blogs Peter Wildeford (a superforecaster), @omarsar0 aka elvis from DAIR in X, also many researchers directly although some of them like roon or @tszzl are more entertaining than informative. The point about polluted information environment resonates on me; in general but especially with AI. You get a very incomplete and strange understanding by following something like NYT who seem to concentrate more on politics than technology itself. Of course there are adjacent areas of ML or AI where the sources would be completely different, say protein or genomics models, or weather models, or research on diffusion, image generation etc. The field is nowadays so large and active that it's hard to grasp everything that is happening on the surface level. Do you _have_ to follow? Of course not, people over here are just typically curious and willing to follow groundbreaking technological advancements. In some cases like in software development I'd also say just skipping AI is destructive to the career in the long term, although there one can take a tools approach instead of trying to keep track of every announcement. (My work is such that I'm expected to keep track of the whole thing on a general level.)
rglover 1y ago
You don't need to "keep up," you just need to loosely pay attention to identify things/features that will make you more productive, test them out, and keep what actually works (not what some influencer claims to work on social media). In fact, I feel far more confident in my understanding by listening to researchers who dismiss the wild claims about AI's potential—not hype it blindly [1]. There's far too much noise, churn, and indecision at this stage to get any productive value out of riding the bleeding edge. If it's actually revolutionary, you'll hear about it on HN. [1] https://x.com/burkov https://x.com/burkov
- jononor 1y ago
  Yeah, spending a few hours trying things out will be worth much more than spending hours reading about it.
givemeethekeys 1y ago
How much time do people spend weekly trying to keep up with AI news?
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
I think AI will have a huge impact but I don’t see a need to keep up. The current systems are still primitive and I bet in a few years they will be way easier to use and more productive. You can use current tech like phones or cars just fine without having kept up. I don’t see why AI will be different. In a sense it may be more efficient to ignore the current state for a while and jump on later.
bGl2YW5j 1y ago
I think the feeling to keep up is simply fear of being left behind. Fear is the same thing driving people to become defensive when others dismiss the idea of needing to keep up, because that undermines their core belief that the new “AI skills” they’ve acquired will keep them safe from job disruption. It’s also interesting that at the heart of the skill set evolving around efficient LLM use, is communication. Engineers and technical people have been the first to admit for decades that they struggle with effective communication. Now everyone’s an expert orator, capable of describing in phenomenal detail to the LLM what they need from it? Not worrying about all this feels so much better! This week I saw a video of a robot assembling PCBs at lightning speed. This reminded me a lot of an LLM coding for us, but there are still numerous people in the production line to design, oversee and manage this kind of production. Software engineering is changing but not going.
Johnnyang66 1y ago
If you want to stay efficiently up to date with the AI era, I recommend spending five minutes a day on https://infobuzz.ai https://infobuzz.ai. The site manually curates AI news from major media outlets within the past 24 hours—super useful.
jacooper 1y ago
Use Twitter and follow the right people.
Belichi 1y ago
Thanks for this
dgeiser13 1y ago
Everyone in the whole world has to keep up with AI progress at this level? Holy crap that's a lot of wasted human potential.
unsignedint 1y ago
I don't think it's necessary to keep up with every detail of general AI developments. Depending on your field, it's more effective to focus selectively—for example, I pay closer attention to natural language processing and LLM applications because my work is in language technology. You don't need to dive deep into what every new service, model, or solution is doing. Instead, I keep an eye on them with peripheral awareness, so to speak. Just because a new model boasts impressive benchmarks doesn’t mean it’s practically useful in real-world contexts. Likewise, trends like agents and “vibe coding” might be valuable in certain scenarios—and that’s great when they are—but they don’t magically solve every business problem. To be clear, I do explore and make use of new technologies. But my main focus is on what’s actually useful for me. Otherwise, it’s easy to get swept up in the hype—a sea of performative glorification that everyone (and their cats) seems to be chasing. In fact, sometimes there’s value in being a strategic laggard. The latest shiny thing often comes with a hefty price tag, and being aware—without being dazzled—goes a long way.
yowayb 1y ago
I'm grateful for low-level work, but what I really need is massive mocap datasets of cats moving so I can make a cat game with realistic motion (none of this walking on an invisible treadmill that rotates), and access to everyone's tax returns so I can make tax-filing software that actually works easily (for complex returns).
dackdel 1y ago
https://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-way https://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-way heres a lot of what you need to know, without technical jargon
sprybear 1y ago
Totally agree — staying current with AI is like trying to drink from a firehose. Things evolve fast: new models drop, research moves quickly, and applications keep multiplying. Followed the X list.
rustybolt 1y ago
> "and why you must too" Oh please
gloomyday 1y ago
Honestly, I think keeping up with AI progress is mostly a waste of time. The amount of noise is too high to be worth our time, and the worthwhile stuff eventually reach us anyway.
tim333 1y ago
>...and why you must too Whether you spend time following it all depends on your situation. Sure if your job involves implementing AI you should keep up but that's not most people. >... has been the fastest moving technology Sure there'a a lot happening at the moment but I think I tried writing some not good AI stuff 45 years ago and followed it since and in some ways it's been quite slow moving. It can be good to be aware of the bigger picture.
hutderek 1y ago
Models evolve, frameworks and tools outdate. All within months/quarter time frame. I would suggest form your own workflow, keep using the paid version of the mainstream LLM model.
ziranova 1y ago
[dead]
novoreorx 1y ago
Isn't this a spread of FOMO?
ath_ray 1y ago
Author here. I understand the critique in the comments about not justifying the "why" part enough. The people who this was intended for and who benefited from it didn't need much of a justification, because they were already excited about AI (there was more justifying in the first draft, but I removed it because it made it tedious to read). I might consider removing the parenthetical from the title. I don't intend to induce FOMO into anyone for keeping up. If you don't want to keep up, that's your prerogative. AI has always been one of the most interesting parts of computer science to me, and watching its capabilities rapidly improve in recent years has been energising for the Hacker in me (the Hacker that this site is named after!). And also the sci-fi nerd in me. But there's a lot of sludge out there, and so this blog started as a list to give a starting point for enthusiastic colleagues and other folks in my circles. Aside, I generally lament the general cynicism that has taken over this site, and in the industry in general. As technologists, we should be excited about technology. And I don't mean in a performative, uncritical way. It should be a joyful dissection, a desire to learn new things and be there for the breakthroughs. It's also on us to make sure we're trying to do Good with it. I also believe that knowledge is (some) power, and it helps us reclaim some agency that will help us steer technology into a Good place. It doesn't make sense to be anti-technology and anti-curiosity as a tech worker. We really can make technology fun again. We just have to allow ourselves to be curious about it and I want to enable some of that :) PS: I have a section in the article that mentions what "reading this list" looks like. It's usually 15-20 minutes of my time every day.

284 points by itzlambda 1y ago

Gwern used to be great to follow, but he fell off hard. His ego doesn't match his (known) accomplishments, and he hasn't had anything original to say in awhile. RIP Gwern and Google+.

muglug 1y ago

Just follow the first bullet point (read simonw's blog) and you'll probably be fine.

dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
Too lazy for that, a Fireship accompanying the morning coffee must suffice.
krat0sprakhar 1y ago
+1 - super high quality and almost no clickbait
- bzmrgonz 1y ago
  not to mention that soothing roller coaster voice of his!! hahaha.

pamelafox 1y ago

Great list! I also subscribe to Gergeley Orosz' "Pragmatic Engineer" which covers many AI topics now, and to Gary Marcus' substack, which tackles topics more from an LLM skeptic perspective. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/ https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/ https://substack.com/@garymarcus https://substack.com/@garymarcus Plus I subscribe to updates from Python packages like Langchain and PydanticAI to see what they're up to, since that's usually reflective of what's happening in broader industry. I'm not on X anymore so I can't follow many of the folks directly, but some of them (like Simon Willison) also post on BlueSky and Mastodon, fortunately. Some folks like Sebastian Raschka and Chip Huyen also post on LinkedIn. Kind of all over, but eventually, I see a good amount of what's happening.

jameslk 1y ago

Maybe I’ve been missing some important stuff, but it seems the most relevant and important updates eventually just bubble up to the front page of HN or get mentioned in the comments

mettamage 1y ago
This is my attitude for all tech surrounding IT
- gerdesj 1y ago
  Expert Systems looked really cool back in the '80s. Doctors would become a thing of the past etc etc. It seemed so obvious - codify knowledge and then ask it questions. Profit! This time the expert systems generate themselves over vast fields of everything by reading Facebook, Reddit and the rest of the internet that they can find. On that rather shaky basis the next "leap" in AI will be around 2070. Perhaps that one will create AGI or something that looks more like it.
SoftTalker 1y ago
Trying to keep up is like jumping on a 90mph treadmill. I have decided to opt out. I think AI (and currently LLMs) is more than a fad and not going away but it's in a huge state of churn right now. I'm not investing a ton of time into anything until I have to. In another few years the landscape will hopefully be more clear. Or not, but at least I won't have spent a lot of time on stuff that has quickly become irrelevant. I'm currently not using AI or LLMs in any of my day-to-day work.
- HellDunkel 1y ago
  This. When has early adoptation paid off lately? Remember prompt engineering?
  - Disposal8433 1y ago
    I remember the same FOMO that happened with "Google searching." People wrote and sold books about how to search properly on Google. The same with AI will happen: either it will flop, or we'll be able to learn all the needed skills in a few days. I don't worry about it.

kybernetikos 1y ago

The big question for me at the moment is whether to go pay-for-tool or pay-for-model. If I pay for a tool that includes access to frontier models, then they'll keep the models up to date over time for me, let me use models from multiple providers, and the tool is carefully designed around the capabilities and limitations of the models it works with. On the other hand I can't really use the powerful model the tool works with for other applications or write my own. If I pay for models, then I can only really use it with that manufacturers tools or tools that aren't optimised for the model but allow you to bring your own keys, and if the model provider I'm paying falls behind then I'm tied in for the duration of the contract. The big advantage is that there is a lot of innovation in tooling happening at the moment and you can avoid being locked out of that or having to pay many times for access to the same frontier models accross multiple different tools.

lumost 1y ago
I think we'll see a shift to BYO LLM in the future. I saw that overleaf offers an assistant feature and an associated subscription. But I already pay for ChatGPT and Github copilot, I'm not going to pay for a third assistant - particularly when I can just bypass overleaf and use copilot in vscode directly.
- kybernetikos 1y ago
  I think commercially there'll be a really strong pull for dev tools to resell access to frontier models. It's hard to make money out of dev tools, but if you tie in a service people are prepared to pay hundreds of dollars a month for, then suddenly it looks easier to make money out of an otherwise unsaleable IDE plugin that accesses that service.
  - vunderba 1y ago
    Yeah, Raycast and Warp are two tools that are definitely trying to do this.
- smarx007 1y ago
  I think Github already offers BYOK (bring your own key). I think the problem is that you are still expected to pay for all the premium subs, the key only allows you to go above the rate/monthly limits. I think Jetbrains does it better with a full BYOM for models, including ollama. And I think if you go for ollama, you only need to pay for the IDE license, not for the AI add-on but don't quote me on that.

twapi 1y ago

Simon Willison's weblog is almost enough, highest S/N

desertmonad 1y ago
^ https://simonwillison.net https://simonwillison.net
baal80spam 1y ago
And thankfully, he has an RSS!
password4321 1y ago
You can "you can pay [Simon] to send you less" ($10+ GitHub sponsor) > intended to be a ten minute read that catches you up on the most important developments from the past month in LLMs https://simonwillison.net/about/ https://simonwillison.net/about/
- jononor 1y ago
  Ahahaha, that is legit a nice framing and "business model" for a Patreon in the AI space. Drinking from the firehose and washpanning it, so that not everyone has to do the same.

reactordev 1y ago

Andrej's talks have helped me tremendously. They're up on YT [0]. For a long time I used to mentor and help machine learning scientists but when I hear Andrej speak, it's like I'm the student without any knowledge. It was a really strange feeling at first but I've come to value so much. I'm Jon Snow. I know Nothing (compared to Andrej). [0] https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy

n8cpdx 1y ago

Article does not make the case for why you must keep up. AFAICT the best strategy would have been to completely tune out AI for the last ~3 years: - AI has not meaningfully improved productivity (unless you’re doing something super basic like react and were already bad at it). If you are using AI in a transformative way, that looks different today than it did 6 months ago. - AI has not stolen jobs (end of ZIRP did that) - The field changes so fast that you could completely tune out, and at any moment become up-to-date because the news from 3 months ago is irrelevant. I don’t get where this meme that “you have to keep up” comes from. You have agency. You can get off the treadmill. You will be fine.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
I have been tuning out for the last ~3 years and unfortunately it hasn't been the best strategy because the hype is still running roughshod all over me It is very likely my employer will use my AI apathy as an excuse to include me in the next round of layoffs, compared to my coworkers that are very AI enthusiastic
- scellus 1y ago
  Maybe that would even be justified, if you are a software developer? If not now, at least soon. Imagine a software developer who refuses to use IDEs, or any kind of editor beyond sed, or version control, or some other essential tool. AI is soon similar, except in rare niche cases.
  - sshine 1y ago
    I've met many people smarter than myself who object to all of those. One professor thought syntax highlighting was a distraction. Lots of colleagues used vim/helix instead of IDEs. I haven't met anyone who refused version control from an intelligent standpoint. The most reasonable objection to AI from people who don't hate it are: I just don't know how it could help me; it's not as skilled as me at my job, and I'm already doing fine.
  - hagbarth 1y ago

lsy 1y ago

If you have a decent understanding of how LLMs work (you put in basically every piece of text you can find, get a statistical machine that models text really well, then use contractors to train it to model text in conversational form), then you probably don't need to consume a big diet of ongoing output from PR people, bloggers, thought leaders, and internet rationalists. That seems likely to get you going down some millenarian path that's not helpful. Despite the feeling that it's a fast-moving field, most of the differences in actual models over the last years are in degree and not kind, and the majority of ongoing work is in tooling and integrations, which you can probably keep up with as it seems useful for your work. Remembering that it's a model of text and is ungrounded goes a long way to discerning what kinds of work it's useful for (where verification of output is either straightforward or unnecessary), and what kinds of work it's not useful for.

thorum 1y ago
Beyond a basic understanding of how LLMs work, I find most LLM news fits into one of these categories: - Someone made a slightly different tool for using LLMs (may or may not be useful depending on whether existing tools meet your needs) - Someone made a model that is incrementally better at something, beating the previous state-of-the-art by a few % points on one benchmark or another (interesting to keep an eye on, but remember that this happens all the time and this new model will be outdated in a few months - probably no one will care about Kimi-K2 or GPT 4.1 by next January) I think most people can comfortably ignore that kind of news and it wouldn’t matter. On the other hand, some LLM news is: - Someone figured out how to give a model entirely new capabilities. Examples: RL and chain of thought. Coding agents that actually sort of work now. Computer Use. True end-to-end multimodal modals. Intelligent tool use. Most people probably should be paying attention to those developments (and trying to look forward to what’s coming next). But the big capability leaps are rare and exciting enough that a cursory skim of HN posts with >500 points should keep you up-to-date. I’d argue that, as with other tech skills, the best way to develop your understanding of LLMs and their capabilities is not through blogs or videos etc. It’s to build something. Experience for yourself what the tools are capable of, what does and doesn’t work, what is directly useful to your own work, etc.
- 1y ago

blactuary 1y ago

Actually no I do not have to keep up

paul7986 1y ago
Indeed just get out of tech and make a new living! Tech jobs are declining and will continue then fall off a cliff with one doing the job ten use to. Followed by other white collar and blue collar (AMazons warehouse robots) jobs. Happily canceled my GPT Plus this week; personally not gonna feed that beast any longer! As well it can not generate maps (create road trip travel maps showing distance between locations to share with friends, a creek tubing map route & etc) at all like Gemini can for free.
- astrange 1y ago
  > Tech jobs are declining and will continue then fall off a cliff with one doing the job ten use to. This would increase employment ceteris paribus. That's like saying inventing new programming languages is bad because they're too productive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - kybernetikos 1y ago
    >> one doing the job ten use to. > This would increase employment ceteris paribus. This might be true, but if it is, the one "doing the job ten use[d] to" would not actually being doing the same kind of work at all, and so therefore might not be the same people or even same kind of people. Even if we do Jevons ourselves out of this situation, it might still spell employment disaster for mid level coders, while increasing employment for product managers.
    - astrange 1y ago
      Indeed that's the case, but it's sort of what software engineers signed up for anyway. I don't know if people are expecting to go their whole careers without learning a new stack / language. Maybe they are?

phyzome 1y ago

The article doesn't actually explain the "why", which severely undercuts the existence of the "how" list. It's fine to go do other things with your precious time instead.

pizzathyme 1y ago
Exactly. I have been questioning the need to "keep up". As the best AI innovations arrive, the ones that are useful will eventually make their way to the mainstream (and me). I didn't "keep up" with the nascent development of spreadsheets or Google Docs. Once they were widely used, I adopted them just fine, and haven't missed out on anything. Unless you are building an AI startup furiously searching for PMF before your runway expires, I don't see the urgency.
- gowld 1y ago
  Someone who keeps up on AI and finds productivity gains will outcompete someone who doesn't, even for activities that aren't develoing new AI weren't AI-based before. What is an "AI startup"? If you add a chatbot do your product, are you an "AI startup"? Does "startup" require having no moat? Can you be an established stable business that loses everything to a startup that leapfrogs your tech, AltaVista?
  - _se 1y ago
    Or, they'll waste their time on trivial nonsense and get nothing useful done. Which is seeming more and more likely every day.
  - itsafarqueue 1y ago
    Every startup is now an AI startup.

linsomniac 1y ago

Here's my current rule of thumb: If you have successfully built a couple projects using agentic tooling and Claude 4 or similar models: you are doing a fine job of keeping up. Otherwise, you are at least a generation behind.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
Behind what? Isn't the whole promise of AI tools that they just work? What skill am I missing out on learning, exactly, by not using them right now? Prompt Engineering? I think I'm a reasonably good communicator in both voice and text, so what skill am I failing to train by not using LLMs right now?
- linsomniac 1y ago
  >Isn't the whole promise of AI tools that they just work? No, not at all. Like with pretty much any development tool, you need to get proficient with them. >what skill am I missing out on At this point, it seems like pretty much all of them related to generative AI. But, the most recent of them that I'll point at is: tooling tooling tooling, and prompting. But the specific answer (to answer your "exactly") is going to depend on you and what problems you are solving. That's why on tries not to fall behind, so you can see how to use tooling in a rapidly evolving landscape, for your exact circumstances. >I think I'm a reasonably good communicator in both voice and text, so what skill am I failing to train by not using LLMs right now? You know how to achieve something you will use different words with different people? You don't talk to your spouse the same way you talk to your parents or your children or your friends or your coworkers, right? You understand that if you are familiar with someone you speak to them differently if you want to achieve something, yes?
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    this is just ridiculous. you can get up to speed with SOTA tooling in a few hours. A system prompt is just a prompt that runs every time. Tool calls are just patterns that are fine tuned into place so that we can parse specific types of LLM output with traditional software. Agents are just a LLM REPL with a context specific system prompt, and limited ability to execute commands none of this stuff is complicated, and the models themselves have been basically the same since GPT-2 was released years ago

codebolt 1y ago

Just subscribing to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google on YouTube is pretty helpful. They post demos of all major new feature releases that are good to skim through to get a sense of where the frontier is moving (just take all claims about capabilities with a grain of salt). I've also got some gems from Microsofts Build talks, specifically whenever Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich get together, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIFDVOXMNDc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIFDVOXMNDc

nice_byte 1y ago

Doesn't explain the "why you must too" part

tezza 1y ago

Add to the list: https://x.com/rowancheung https://x.com/rowancheung - Rowan Cheung: “Daily” updates and insider access

School-Cotton 1y ago

> and why you must too No, I don't think I do. Been working great for me so far.

deadbabe 1y ago

Don’t you ever let people make you think you have to tirelessly follow some tech progress or stay on top of things all the time. Progress is like a bus. You can just get on board at any time. You’re not going to fall behind. And staying up to date doesn't keep you “ahead” of anyone. Doing things is what gets you ahead, and if you don’t feel like doing something right now, don’t worry about, do something later, and you’ll be ahead of people who aren’t doing anything at that moment.

scellus 1y ago

If one wants to follow AI development mostly in the sense of LLMs and associated frontier models, that's an excellent list with over half of the names familiar, to whom I have converged independently. I have a list in X for AI; it's the best source of information overall on the subject, although some podcasts or RSS feeds directly from the long-form writers would be quite close. (If one is a researcher themselves, then of course it's a must to follow the paper feeds, not commentary or secondary references.) I'd add https://epoch.ai https://epoch.ai to the list, on podcasts at least Dwarkesh Patel; on blogs Peter Wildeford (a superforecaster), @omarsar0 aka elvis from DAIR in X, also many researchers directly although some of them like roon or @tszzl are more entertaining than informative. The point about polluted information environment resonates on me; in general but especially with AI. You get a very incomplete and strange understanding by following something like NYT who seem to concentrate more on politics than technology itself. Of course there are adjacent areas of ML or AI where the sources would be completely different, say protein or genomics models, or weather models, or research on diffusion, image generation etc. The field is nowadays so large and active that it's hard to grasp everything that is happening on the surface level. Do you _have_ to follow? Of course not, people over here are just typically curious and willing to follow groundbreaking technological advancements. In some cases like in software development I'd also say just skipping AI is destructive to the career in the long term, although there one can take a tools approach instead of trying to keep track of every announcement. (My work is such that I'm expected to keep track of the whole thing on a general level.)

rglover 1y ago

You don't need to "keep up," you just need to loosely pay attention to identify things/features that will make you more productive, test them out, and keep what actually works (not what some influencer claims to work on social media). In fact, I feel far more confident in my understanding by listening to researchers who dismiss the wild claims about AI's potential—not hype it blindly [1]. There's far too much noise, churn, and indecision at this stage to get any productive value out of riding the bleeding edge. If it's actually revolutionary, you'll hear about it on HN. [1] https://x.com/burkov https://x.com/burkov

jononor 1y ago
Yeah, spending a few hours trying things out will be worth much more than spending hours reading about it.

givemeethekeys 1y ago

How much time do people spend weekly trying to keep up with AI news?

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago

I think AI will have a huge impact but I don’t see a need to keep up. The current systems are still primitive and I bet in a few years they will be way easier to use and more productive. You can use current tech like phones or cars just fine without having kept up. I don’t see why AI will be different. In a sense it may be more efficient to ignore the current state for a while and jump on later.

bGl2YW5j 1y ago

I think the feeling to keep up is simply fear of being left behind. Fear is the same thing driving people to become defensive when others dismiss the idea of needing to keep up, because that undermines their core belief that the new “AI skills” they’ve acquired will keep them safe from job disruption. It’s also interesting that at the heart of the skill set evolving around efficient LLM use, is communication. Engineers and technical people have been the first to admit for decades that they struggle with effective communication. Now everyone’s an expert orator, capable of describing in phenomenal detail to the LLM what they need from it? Not worrying about all this feels so much better! This week I saw a video of a robot assembling PCBs at lightning speed. This reminded me a lot of an LLM coding for us, but there are still numerous people in the production line to design, oversee and manage this kind of production. Software engineering is changing but not going.

Johnnyang66 1y ago

If you want to stay efficiently up to date with the AI era, I recommend spending five minutes a day on https://infobuzz.ai https://infobuzz.ai. The site manually curates AI news from major media outlets within the past 24 hours—super useful.

jacooper 1y ago

Use Twitter and follow the right people.

Belichi 1y ago

Thanks for this

dgeiser13 1y ago

Everyone in the whole world has to keep up with AI progress at this level? Holy crap that's a lot of wasted human potential.

unsignedint 1y ago

I don't think it's necessary to keep up with every detail of general AI developments. Depending on your field, it's more effective to focus selectively—for example, I pay closer attention to natural language processing and LLM applications because my work is in language technology. You don't need to dive deep into what every new service, model, or solution is doing. Instead, I keep an eye on them with peripheral awareness, so to speak. Just because a new model boasts impressive benchmarks doesn’t mean it’s practically useful in real-world contexts. Likewise, trends like agents and “vibe coding” might be valuable in certain scenarios—and that’s great when they are—but they don’t magically solve every business problem. To be clear, I do explore and make use of new technologies. But my main focus is on what’s actually useful for me. Otherwise, it’s easy to get swept up in the hype—a sea of performative glorification that everyone (and their cats) seems to be chasing. In fact, sometimes there’s value in being a strategic laggard. The latest shiny thing often comes with a hefty price tag, and being aware—without being dazzled—goes a long way.

yowayb 1y ago

I'm grateful for low-level work, but what I really need is massive mocap datasets of cats moving so I can make a cat game with realistic motion (none of this walking on an invisible treadmill that rotates), and access to everyone's tax returns so I can make tax-filing software that actually works easily (for complex returns).

dackdel 1y ago

https://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-way https://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-way heres a lot of what you need to know, without technical jargon

sprybear 1y ago

Totally agree — staying current with AI is like trying to drink from a firehose. Things evolve fast: new models drop, research moves quickly, and applications keep multiplying. Followed the X list.

rustybolt 1y ago

> "and why you must too" Oh please

gloomyday 1y ago

Honestly, I think keeping up with AI progress is mostly a waste of time. The amount of noise is too high to be worth our time, and the worthwhile stuff eventually reach us anyway.

tim333 1y ago

>...and why you must too Whether you spend time following it all depends on your situation. Sure if your job involves implementing AI you should keep up but that's not most people. >... has been the fastest moving technology Sure there'a a lot happening at the moment but I think I tried writing some not good AI stuff 45 years ago and followed it since and in some ways it's been quite slow moving. It can be good to be aware of the bigger picture.

hutderek 1y ago

Models evolve, frameworks and tools outdate. All within months/quarter time frame. I would suggest form your own workflow, keep using the paid version of the mainstream LLM model.

ziranova 1y ago

[dead]

novoreorx 1y ago

Isn't this a spread of FOMO?

ath_ray 1y ago

Author here. I understand the critique in the comments about not justifying the "why" part enough. The people who this was intended for and who benefited from it didn't need much of a justification, because they were already excited about AI (there was more justifying in the first draft, but I removed it because it made it tedious to read). I might consider removing the parenthetical from the title. I don't intend to induce FOMO into anyone for keeping up. If you don't want to keep up, that's your prerogative. AI has always been one of the most interesting parts of computer science to me, and watching its capabilities rapidly improve in recent years has been energising for the Hacker in me (the Hacker that this site is named after!). And also the sci-fi nerd in me. But there's a lot of sludge out there, and so this blog started as a list to give a starting point for enthusiastic colleagues and other folks in my circles. Aside, I generally lament the general cynicism that has taken over this site, and in the industry in general. As technologists, we should be excited about technology. And I don't mean in a performative, uncritical way. It should be a joyful dissection, a desire to learn new things and be there for the breakthroughs. It's also on us to make sure we're trying to do Good with it. I also believe that knowledge is (some) power, and it helps us reclaim some agency that will help us steer technology into a Good place. It doesn't make sense to be anti-technology and anti-curiosity as a tech worker. We really can make technology fun again. We just have to allow ourselves to be curious about it and I want to enable some of that :) PS: I have a section in the article that mentions what "reading this list" looks like. It's usually 15-20 minutes of my time every day.