AI Beginner’s Reading List

This AI Reading List was put together by Jack Soslow and shared as a Google Doc, so I’ve republished here in case that list goes missing.

The reading list is aimed towards the AI curious looking to go down the rabbit hole not the AI expert.

The original list was list was inspired by The Index from Jeremy Nixon, which is more about worldly knowledge, and Aman’s Reading List, which is more about becoming technically up to speed. 

Jack is accepting recommendations by tweeting a DM to @JackSoslow.

I’ll also be adding links to this AI Beginner’s Reading List as I discover them.

Blogs / Threads / Papers

S Tier (“Best of the Best”)

• Tim Urban (2015) — The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
• Andrej Karpathy (2017) — Software 2.0
• Gwern (2020) — The Scaling Hypothesis
• Wikipedia — The History of Artificial Intelligence
• Google Research, Vaswani et al. (2017) — Attention Is All You Need

A Tier

• Eliezer Yudkowsky (2001) — Creating Friendly AI Summary
• Tim Urban (2015) — The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction
• Deepmind (2017) — AlphaGo
• Eliezer Yudkowsky (2017) — There’s no Fire Alarm for Artificial Intelligence
• Jay Alammar (2018) — The Illustrated Transformer
• OpenAI (2020) — Language Models are Few Shot Learners (GPT-3)
• Deepmind (2020) — MuZero: Mastering Go, Chess, Shogi, and Atari without rules
• OpenAI (2020) — AI and Efficiency
• OpenAI (2021) — CLIP: Connecting Text and Images
• Nostalgebraist (2022) — Chinchilla’s Wild Implications
• Gwern (2022) —  It looks like you’re trying to take over the world

Best of the Rest

• Scott Alexander (2016) — Superintelligence FAQ
• OpenAI (2017) — Learning to Communicate
• OpenAI (2017) — Evolution Strategies as an Alternative to Reinforcement Learning
• OpenAI (2017) — Learning to Cooperate, Compete, and Communicate
• OpenAI (2017) — Proximal Policy Optimization
• OpenAI (2017) — Competitive Self-Play
• OpenAI (2018) — AI and Compute
• Deepmind (2019) — Capture the Flag: the emergence of complex cooperative agents
• OpenAI (2019) — OpenAI Five defeats Dota 2 World Champions
• OpenAI (2019) — Deep Double Descent
• Jay Alammar (2020) — How GPT-3 Works: Visualizations and Animations
• Evhub (2020) — 11 Proposals of for Building Safe Advanced AI
• Deepmind (2022) — Discovering novel algorithms with AlphaTensor
• Deepmind (2020) — Using JAX to accelerate our research’
• Deepmind (2020) — AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology
• Leigh Marie Braswell (2021) — Startup Opportunities in Machine Learning Infrastructure
• Meta AI (2021) — Teaching AI how to forget at scale
• OpenAI (2021) — DALL-E: Creating Images from Text
• OpenAI (2021) — Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks
• OpenAI (2021) — Improving Language Model Behavior by Training on a Curated Dataset
• OpenAI (2021) — OpenAI Codex
• OpenAI (2022) — Aligning Language Models to Follow Instructions
• OpenAI (2022) — DALL-E 2
• OpenAI (2022) — Learning to Play Minecraft with Video PreTraining
• OpenAI (2022) — Introducing Whisper
• OpenAI (2022) — ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialog
• Nature (2022) — What’s next for AlphaFold
• Meta AI (2022) — CICERO: AN AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people
• Yann Lecun (2022) — How to make AI systems learn and reason like animals and humans
• Robert May (2022) — The Mental Model Most AI Investors Are Missing
• Roon (2022) — Text is the Universal Interface
• Jack Soslow (2022) — 2022 AI Research and Trends Round Up

Podcasts

S Tier (“Best of the Best”)

• Sam Altman | Greymatter — AI for the Next Era
• Connor Leahy | Machine Learning Street Talk — AI Alignment & AGI Fire Alarm
• Demis Hassabis | Lex Fridman — Demis Hassabis: DeepMind

A Tier

• George Hotz | Lex Fridman — Comma.ai, OpenPilot, and Autonomous Vehicles
• Ilya Sutskever | Lex Fridman — Deep Learning
• Emad Mostaque | Good Time Show — Founder of Stable Diffusion on AI ethics, religion, India’s AI future and open source
• Ben Goertzel | Machine Learning Street Talk — Artificial General Intelligence
• Andrej Karpathy | Lex Fridman — Tesla AI, Self-Driving, Optimus, Aliens, and AGI

Best of the Rest

• a16z — GPT-3, Beyond the Hype
• Stratechery — The AI Unbundling
• Reading for your Life — The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil
• Yann Lecun | Lex Fridman — Dark Matter of Intelligence and Self-Supervised Learning
• Jim Keller | Lex Fridman — The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness
• George Hotz | Lex Fridman — Hacking the Simulation & Learning to Drive with Neural Nets
• Ben Goertzel | Lex Fridman — Artificial General Intelligence — Lex Fridman Podcast
• Gary Marcus | Machine Learning Street Talk — Prof. Gary Marcus 3.0
• Connor Leahy — GPT-3 as an AI Fire Alarm
• Joscha Bach | Lex Fridman — Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality
• John Carmack | Lex Fridman — Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets

Videos / Video Podcasts / Video Essays

S Tier (“Best of the Best”)

• Eliezer Yudkowsky (2007) —  Introducing the Singularity: Three Major Schools of Thought
• Eliezer Yudkowsky (2017) — Difficulties of Artificial General Intelligence Alignment
• Eric Elliott (2020) — What it’s like to be a Computer: An Interview with GPT-3
• Ethan Caballero (2022) — Broken Neural Scaling Laws

A Tier

• Yannic Kilcher (2017) — Attention is all you need
• OpenAI (2019) — Multi Agent Hide and Seek
• WSJ (2019) — How China is Using Artificial Intelligence in Classrooms
• Yannic Kilcher (2020) — GPT-3: Language Models are Few Shot Learners (paper explained)

Best of the Rest

• Eliezer Yudkowsky (2012) — Intelligence Explosion
• OpenAI (2017) — Dota2
• Fei Fei Li (2018) — How to make AI that’s good for people
• George Hotz (2019) — Jailbreaking the Simulation with George Hotz
• Lex Fridman (2019) — Deep Learning Basics: Introduction and Overview
• Sam Altman (2020) — Sam Altman talks about AI at Big Compute 20 Tech Conference
• Two Minute Papers (2020) — OpenAI GPT-3 – Good at Almost Everything
• Jack Soslow (2020) — Two AIs talking to each other
• Lex Fridman (2020) — GPT-3 vs Human Brain
• Harrison Kinsley and Daniel Kukiela (2020) – Neural Networks from Scratch – p.3 The Dot Product
• Lex Fridman (2020) — Deep Learning State of the Art
• Bycloud (2020) — What Happens When AI Robots Design Themselves
• Two Minute Papers (2020) — MuZero: DeepMind’s New AI Mastered More Than 50 Games
• Mira Murati (2020) — Ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity
• Two Minute Papers (2020) — Can an AI Design Our Tax Policy?
• Neat AI (2021) — Lenia — Conway’s game of life arrives in the 21st century
• Sam Altman (2021) — The Future of AI Research from DALL-E to GPT-3
• Yannic Kilcher (2021) — How far can we scale up? Deep Learning’s Diminishing Returns (Article Review)
• Two Minute Papers (2021) — Watch Tesla’s Self-Driving Car Learning in a Simulation

• Ethan Caballero (2022) — Scale is all you need
• Two Minute Papers (2022) — DeepMind AlphaFold A Gift to Humanity
• OpenAI (2022) — Aligning AI Systems with Human Intent
• NeatAI (2022) — AI Learns NEAT Pacman Solution
• Yannic Kilcher (2022) — Grokking: Generalization beyond Overfitting on small algorithmic datasets (Paper Explained)
• The Third Build (2022) — How an AI is Becoming the World’s Best Pokemon Player

Books

• Deep Learning (2016)
• Superintelligence (2014)
• The Singularity is Near (2005)

Movies

• AlphaGo (2017)
• Her (2013)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)