Answer: How can we find the best way to track developments in AI?

 Tracking is an important skill to have... 

Not an actual server farm, but one imagined by Meta's gen-AI.

... and we need to get good at it.  

This week we asked ourselves, "How can we best teach ourselves about current developments in AI?"   In other words, how can I be an autodidact about AI, a field that's changing rapidly?  

So... this Challenge is really about what you do when you've got to drink from the raging torrent of your latest topic area.  Here's some practical advice that might help you out...   

1.  What should I do to stay on top of / learn-about / understand the development happening right now in AI?  Some of the tactics we talked about last week kind-of don't work well (the textbooks haven't been written yet), and even taking a course means re-taking that course a year later when everything changes.  So... what's a SearchResearcher to do?  What advice would you give?  What resources have you found that help answer this Challenge? 

This kind of rapid following / tracking is an important skill, perhaps now more than ever.  

Here's my summary of what I do to try and stay on top of the AI game.  (You can substitute your favorite fast-changing topic for "AI" in all that follows.)  

1. Track the news through blogs.  I sign up for new AI-tracking blogs when I see new posts, but I also fairly actively prune away the ones that aren't satisfying my interests.  I currently follow: 

Ben's Bites - mostly AI product launches

MLearning.ai - lots of how-to articles, a few good in-depth reporting articles 

Jakob Nielsen on UX - but these days, mostly about the UX of AI 

TLDR - 1 post/day, AI, ML, data science news 

OpenAI blog - somewhat irregular

Google's Gemini blog - 1/week; lots of Gemini promotional stuff

Perplexity's blog - also somewhat infrequent 

MIT AI News - academic, but really interesting

But note that this list will change as I add new blogs and delete ones that have drifted away from my interests.  Don't just keep adding stuff to your list! Keep looking for newer / better / more aligned with your interests.  (And be ruthless about getting rid of the deadwood.)  

SRS Regular Reader Arthur gave some good advice in his response: 

So I try to drink from that fire hose through blogs (AI Secret, There's an AI for That, The Rundown AI, and also posts from Perplexity's blog, You.com and others that say what's happening. I file these in a dedicated folder that at some point I can use AI to summarise and draw out the gold. (I haven't yet - but it's an option).

More importantly when something new grabs my attention I try it out. Whether it's Claude3.5, Llama3, DBRX on HuggingFace, ChatGPT4.5o and so on.

Arthur's advice is good:  pick a few blogs to follow and try out new capabilities as you read about them.  (Don't wait!)  Experience beats reading in this regard.  

2. Set up Google Alerts.  We've talked about this before, but it's worth a reminder.  You can set up alerts to run a daily query for you and then email you the latest results.  Set up one or two and try it out at Google Alerts. You can set up an alert to track a specific company (e.g., OpenAI) or a specific site that publishes a lot of breaking results (e.g., arXiv.org).  

3. Set up Google Scholar Alerts.  We've also talked about this before...  You can set up alerts to run a daily query for you just on Google Scholar contents and then email you the latest results. Very handy for tracking the academic work that's going on in your area of interest.  Check out this great article about setting up a Scholar Alert from the University of Tennessee.  Note that these results are completely disjoint from the regular Google Alerts.  

4. Set up Google YouTube Alerts.  Yes, YouTube has its own series of alerts.  (Here's how to set them up. Yes, they are also disjoint from regular Alerts.)  You can go set them up to be notified when a favorite Tuber drops an explainer or demo.  (These can really be quite good: take a look at some of these papers.)  Channels like "AI Explained" and "Two Minute Papers" provide accessible explanations of complex AI concepts and recent developments

5. LinkedIn. Remarkably, LinkedIn has become an incredibly valuable source of up-to-the-second information.  I have a lot of connections that help keep me on top of the news, but I have found that following some folks like Ethan Mollick, Gary Marcus, Andrej Karpathy, and Eric Horvitz.  You'll find more people that align with your interests.   

Most importantly: I spend around 1 hour / day just doing my AI/UX reading--it's baked into my daily routine.  It's really the only way to keep on top.  Pretend you're taking a course on AI technology and this is your study time.  

But don't fret if you miss a day or two--it's not worth your time to feel guilty about missing a few things.  It really is a fire hose out there, and your FOMO is just a burden.  Delete all the notifications you received (or give them a quick once-over before deleting) and get back to your normal practice.  

Keep Searching!