How I Stay Updated on the Latest AI Research

#1 The Batch

The deeplearning.ai weekly newsletter . Each week, it packs recent break-throughs and noteworthy news alongside a short intro by Andrew Ng himself. The best thing about The Batch is that it is quick, self-contained, and always includes some perspective on the news, such as “why it matters.”

This is the best place to start, as it is not overwhelming, is self-contained, and is not focused on any particular sub-topic.

#2 Medium

Yeah, this place is incredible. Make sure you check AI and Data Science as topics of interest and start following people and publications that have similar interests as you. Most of what I see on The Batch I also see here but in more detail. Sometimes I find stuff here before it even gets to The Batch.

The distinctive feature of Medium is the voices. You often see people that work at major companies, startup CEOs, or Ph.D. students of top universities. The tech stuff is more often than not being written by people that are actually in tech. They are not written by trained journalists but by real damn nerds. The cherry goes to the comment section. You are not only reading from these folks, but you also get the chance to talk to them directly and ask anything.

#3 Twitter

Find the people whose work you like and follow them on Twitter. This is enough for the platform to email you their most important tweets. I was surprised by the number of useful links I started receiving after I started doing this. If you don’t know where to start, begin by following the guests of #5.

Twitter is where the news is born.After I created my account and started following AI people, I began to see stories that would only pop up on larger channels after weeks. Before anyone can write a piece on something, its author has already twitted about it. I don’t use twitter for anything else.

#4 YouTube

Similar to Medium, YouTube has many tech people doing essays on AI. The bad thing about YouTube is that it doesn’t have as much curation nor a helpful email digest. The positive side is that it is less demanding on you. Watching a video is way more relaxing to the eyes than reading articles.

My recommendations are TwoMinutesPapers and Yannic Kilcher . The former focuses on presenting eye-pleasing research on AI and graphics, and the latter is more in-deep on analyzing AI papers down to the math. I confess that I don’t really like Yannic’s videos that much, as they are too long, but I love his selection. Whenever he uploads something, I search for the paper to read.

#5 AI Podcast

Lex Fridman is a former MIT professor that runs a podcast on AI and Computer Science. The selection of guests is outstanding. It includes Turing Award winners, Nobel winners, and many brilliant individuals, such as 3Blue1Brown’s host Grant Sanderson and Elon Musk . To me, the beauty of this podcast is that Lex always asks his guests to explain fundamental concepts, but the conversation never shies away from going technical.

This is the place to get perspective.Where else can you find Noam Chomsky and Daniel Kahneman discussing AI’s future? Or maybe the lead engineer behind TensorFlow discussing its history in-depth and not being shy of talking technical? Reading papers is nice, but hearing what the people behind some of the most ground-breaking research to date have to say helps a lot with understanding what is happening now and what will likely happen next.