SearchResearch Challenge (7/10/24): How can we find the best way to track developments in AI?

 A logical continuation from last week's Challenge... 

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

... is to ask 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?  

Assuming you read last week's Answer to the Challenge of How to Find the Best Learning Resources in a Field?  you'll appreciate the distinction here.  That was about how to teach yourself about a field that currently exists and has many resources to search out and use. It was all about how to teach yourself about a deep, quiet pool of knowledge in an area.   

But the current wave of AI developments and research results is pretty staggering.  It's a growing, flowering, burgeoning field... more of a raging torrent of claims, counter-claims, launches, take-downs, and lawsuits.  

How can a person deal with all this?  

You've heard the metaphor:tracking all of the changes in information technology is like "drinking from a fire hose."  That's not bad, but fully charged fire hoses are relatively rare, while it seems that every few months yet another torrent of information springs up, raging down the hillsides and into our lives.  It's not just AI, but also connectomics (how brains are wired), epigenetics (the study of how inheritance happens without DNA), synthetic biology (how to engineer organisms for various purposes), or health data sensors (gadgets to track health data).  Hey, even a field that you THINK would be quiet and placid like archaeology turns out to be pretty active as new imaging systems and sensing technologies hit the field.  We live in a time of rapid development--the science and tech rains deliver a new waterfall of knowledge each week!  

So... this Challenge is really about what you do when you've got to drink from the raging torrent of your latest topic area.  Let's frame this meta-Challenge with respect to AI.  After all, in our SearchResearch land, the developments in AI are rapidly changing things we knew about online research.  

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? 

As always... 

Keep Searching!