Reading List — Matthew Williamson

Reading List

Voices I Follow

The list started where most technical reading starts: how the systems work. It didn't stay there. The people worth reading now are the ones asking what the systems do to us — and the two questions turn out to be the same question, asked from opposite ends.

How it works The crossingWhat it means

Research & Analysis

Import AI

Jack Clark

Weekly newsletter on AI research, policy, and the broader implications of machine intelligence.

Interconnects

Nathan Lambert

Technical analysis of AI research, RLHF, and the science behind language models.

Jan Daniel Semrau

Deep exploration of autonomous agents and cognitive machines.

Fei-Fei Li

Human-centered AI, spatial intelligence, and the scientific and civic choices that shape how intelligent systems enter the world.

Yann LeCun

Foundational deep-learning research and a persistent argument that the path beyond language models runs through world models, reasoning, and learning from the physical world.

Lil'Log

Lilian Weng

Deep, carefully synthesized learning notes on agents, reasoning, alignment, multimodality, and the mechanics of frontier AI research.

François Chollet

Essays on abstraction, generalization, intelligence beyond benchmark skill, and building AI that increases human agency rather than diminishing it.

Will Manidis

Provocative commentary connecting AI, private markets, investing, culture, and the incentives shaping what technology becomes.

Practical & Tooling

Simon Willison's Weblog

Simon Willison

Deep dives on LLMs, datasette, and practical AI tooling from a Django co-creator.

Nate's Newsletter

Nate B. Jones

Amazing video and long form content about how AI is shaping business.

Andrej Karpathy

Exceptionally clear explanations of neural networks, language models, and AI-native software from first principles down to working code.

Chip Huyen

Production-minded writing on AI engineering, machine-learning systems, evaluation, infrastructure, and what survives contact with real users.

Ahead of AI

Sebastian Raschka

Independent, code-driven analysis of language-model architectures, reasoning methods, open-weight models, and notable research papers.

Armin Ronacher

Open-source craft, agentic engineering, and sharp observations about building software without letting complexity become the product.

Industry & Infrastructure

Databricks Blog

Databricks

Innovative techniques like Test-time Adaptive Optimization (TAO) and enterprise AI insights.

GMI Cloud Blog

GMI Cloud

Implications of new AI models like DeepSeek-R1 and cloud infrastructure insights.

Predibase Blog

Predibase

Advanced reasoning models and their applications in enterprise AI.

Humanist & Critical

The Convivial Society

L. M. Sacasas

Essays on technology and the human condition, drawing on Illich and Ellul. Asks what our tools do to human experience, attention, and meaning.

Blood in the Machine

Brian Merchant

AI through the lens of labor and power, from the author of the definitive Luddite history. The Luddites were humanists, not technophobes.

AI as Normal Technology

Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor

Princeton computer scientists (authors of AI Snake Oil) deflating hype with rigor. Treats AI as a tool societies absorb, not a species successor.

The Intrinsic Perspective

Erik Hoel

A neuroscientist-novelist on consciousness, creativity, and why human-made art still matters in the age of AI.

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna

A linguist and a sociologist dismantle AI hype claim by claim. Podcast and newsletter that keep the rest of your feed honest.

Jasmine Sun

Silicon Valley's anthropologist. Writes about the AI industry as a human culture rather than a stack of benchmarks.

Rising Tide

Helen Toner

AI governance and policy from a former OpenAI board member, argued without tribal alignment.

Melanie Mitchell

AI through cognitive science and complex systems, with rigorous attention to abstraction, analogy, understanding, and the limits hidden by fluent behavior.