A running list of the sources I use to keep up with AI, plus the ones I hand to people who want to get up to speed. It is opinionated on purpose. If something made the list, I think it earns your time.
If you are starting from zero, skip ahead to Sources To Get Started and come back to the top once the vocabulary clicks.
Sources I Follow
This is the core of what I track week to week. If you adopt one section, make it this one.
People
- Ethan Mollick and his newsletter at oneusefulthing.org. The best single signal for how AI is changing knowledge work. Practical, grounded, and free of hype.
- Andrew Ng. Clear-eyed on the technical and business reality of AI. A good antidote to both doomers and boosters.
- Dario Amodei. Anthropic's CEO. Worth following for long-view thinking on where the frontier is heading.
YouTube
- Claude. My top pick. Short, practical, and the fastest way to see what is possible.
- How I AI, with Claire Vo. Excellent. Real people showing real workflows, not demos that fall apart the moment you try them.
- Grace Leung. Sharp, well-produced walkthroughs.
- Anthropic. Deeper sessions and research-flavored content.
- Google Cloud Tech. Good for the Google and Gemini side of the house.
- Matthew Berman. Covers a lot of ground and moves fast on new releases. The delivery can grate, but the coverage is worth it.
- Greg Isenberg. Hit or miss. A handful of episodes on building with AI are worth watching. Cherry-pick.
Podcasts
- AI + a16z. My top pick for strategic, longer-horizon thinking.
- The a16z Show. Same strengths, broader tech aperture.
- Me, Myself, and AI, from BCG and MIT. Enterprise case studies told by the people who ran them. Strong if you care about adoption inside real organizations.
- AI in Business, from Emerj. Applied, vertical by vertical.
- The Cognitive Revolution. Deeper conversations with builders and researchers.
- [Everyday AI. youreverydayai.com. Daily cadence. Leans more technical than the name suggests, so treat it as a buffet rather than a must-listen.
Newsletters and blogs
- Anthropic. Product news and research, straight from the source.
- a16z. Strategy and market point of view.
Sources To Get Started
If you are new, start here. These build the foundation: how to think about the tools and how to prompt them well.
Courses and guides
- Anthropic Academy. The hub. Two tracks are worth your time: Claude for work for team and organizational use, and Claude for personal for individual projects and daily tasks.
- Gemini for Google Workspace Prompting Guide 101. The clearest short guide to writing good prompts I have found. The persona, task, context, format framework applies to any model, not just Gemini.
- The 5 Step Playbook for 10x Your AI Productivity, Jeremy Utley. About thirteen minutes and very accessible. The "walk me through your thought process step by step" tip alone is worth the watch.
- Google AI Essentials. A legitimate on-ramp if you are truly starting from zero. If you already use these tools daily, it will feel basic, so skip it.
- LinkedIn Learning and Coursera both have solid catalogs beyond this, though most of the good material sits behind a subscription.
Tools worth trying first hand
Reading only gets you so far. Open these and use them.
- Claude Projects. Bundle your documents, context, and custom instructions in one place so Claude works from your material instead of from a blank slate. The fastest upgrade to how most people use a chatbot.
- Google NotebookLM. Point it at your own sources and it becomes a research assistant grounded in them. The audio overview feature is an unusually good way to absorb dense material.
- Gemini image generation, Nano Banana. Google's image model, strong at legible text in images and at editing from reference photos. The easiest place to start is the Gemini app itself, then move to AI Studio when you want more control.
Deep Dive Sources
For when you want to go past the surface, whether that is the strategy of applying AI or the technical foundations underneath it.
Strategy and enterprise
- a16z. Already in my follow list, but worth calling out again as the best single source for where AI is heading commercially.
- BCG, Deloitte, and Accenture. I read all three for enterprise adoption research and frameworks. Heavier and more formal than anything above, but useful when you need defensible material for a leadership conversation.
Technical and academic
- Stanford CS230, Lecture 8: Agents, Prompts, and RAG. A graduate deep learning lecture, so it assumes more than the rest of this list. Worth it if you want to understand agents, prompting, and retrieval from first principles rather than from tips.