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Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Scientific and academic evaluation will shift away from published papers as the measure of output, toward valuing real-world results.

  Their words

  I predict that, over time, the focus will move away from "papers as the final output."

  AI is breaking the academic sorting machinelemire.me

Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.

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  A society's commitment to truth-telling matters because most individual beliefs are inherited from the surrounding society rather than independently verified

  Their words

  First, if most of our beliefs are handed to us by the society in which we live, it is vital that our society itself values truth and truth-telling.

  Why the story of the Vegetable Lamb was believedtimharford.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

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  Distillation is the most significant debate surrounding open AI models in 2026.

  Their words

  Distillation - the process of training on output tokens from another model - is the single most eventful debate around open models in 2026.

  Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading Listinterconnects.ai

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

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  Programmers should be reading research papers and crawling their references, and the fact that almost none of them do is a bigger gap than any book recommendation could close.

  Their words

  I want to recommend that people read a paper. I'm trying to get more people to just to just read papers because I realized I read a ton of papers.

  youtube.com

Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.

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  The data-centre backlash is about the buildings themselves, not about what people think of AI.

  data centersAmerica

  Their words

  All this combined with the survey data on Americans’ stated reasons for opposing data centers makes me think that attitudes toward AI are probably a meaningful factor for a minority of people opposed to data centers, but I don’t think the backlash overall is driven by people’s thoughts on AI.

  blog.andymasley.com

Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

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  AI-generated junk papers risk overwhelming the hep-th physics field with worthless content.

  Their words

  The result is something completely worthless, but not obviously distinguishable from many other things on hep-th, which is in serious danger of going from something sad and unhealthy to something completely overwhelmed with crud.

  Various and Sundrymath.columbia.edu

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

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  The deployment layer surrounding a model is as important as the model's raw intelligence.

  Their words

  the layer between the raw model and the real-world context seems to be as important as the model's raw intelligence

  Harness Engineering for Self-Improvementlilianweng.github.io

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  A stream of AI-written papers with any error rate at all becomes insufferable, because finding the error costs more than the paper is worth even at ninety-nine percent.

  Their words

  It becomes insufferable like as a mathematician because you you would basically be like I'm every single time I see one of these I kind of don't know if it's worth my time even if 99 out of 100 of them are right.

  youtube.com

Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

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  The surrounding system framework and scaffolding matter more for AI agent capability than the underlying model.

  Their words

  The experiments showed that the system framework matters far more than the underlying model.

  Patterns for Building Cybersecurity Evalseugeneyan.com

Historian of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College; wrote The Wars for Asia and works on why continental and maritime powers fight differently.

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  Russia and China are ringed by the most dysfunctional places on the planet because their own security paradigm manufactures failing states.

  ChinaRussia

  Their words

  One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or they complicit?"

  youtube.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

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  Audit independence is a property of the surrounding system and its evidence flows, not an inherent property of the auditing model itself.

  Their words

  audit independence is not a property of the model. It is a property of the system around the model.

  Who Audits the Auditors?strangeloopcanon.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  Contributing to the internet without monetizing it is still the right way to be online, even after the surrounding culture stopped doing it.

  Their words

  Like picking up trash where you walk, even if the rest of the world is full of litter. You keep doing what you can to make things better.

  Netizensive.rs

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

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  No single person can understand a result like the Higgs boson in depth, and that is what a paper with a thousand authors actually means.

  Their words

  and I don't think it's possible for one person to understand everything in depth. Lots of people understand broadly a lot of these ideas but they don't understand sort of everything in in the depth that is actually utilized. That's why there's these, you know, papers with with well over a thousand authors.

  youtube.com

Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.

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  A statistically significant change is not the same as an important one, and survey data cannot tell you which it is.

  Their words

  Whether that decline matters is a different question — and one the data alone can’t answer.

  America Got a Little More Religious. No, Really.graphsaboutreligion.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

From one piece Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Within a decade AI will do the bulk of what mathematicians spend their time on, and we will discover that was never the important part of the job.

  Their words

  Um I think with within a decade, a lot of things that mathematicians currently do um we we spend a lot of the bulk of our time doing and a lot of stuff we put in our papers today can be done by AI. Um but we will find that that actually wasn't the most important part of what we do.

  youtube.com

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  AI has made his papers richer and broader, but not deeper.

  Their words

  Uh yeah, so it's it's made papers sort of richer and broader, but not necessarily deeper.

  youtube.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  AI researchers should contribute ideas but stop enacting them: a single queue of ideas and automated workers should run the experiments.

  Their words

  But okay, they shouldn't actually be enacting these ideas. There is a queue of ideas and there's maybe an automated scientist that comes up with ideas based on all the archive papers and GitHub repos and it funnels ideas in or researchers can contribute ideas, but it's a single queue and there is workers that pull items and they try them out.

  youtube.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

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  Economics journals have made large datasets and heavy statistics the price of making any causal claim at all, which has squeezed qualitative economic history out of the field.

  Their words

  Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.

  Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobelageofinvention.xyz

Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

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  Attitude, not the surrounding circumstances, determines how hard parenting feels.

  Their words

  none of the imagined deficiencies in your situation are more limiting than your attitude.

  nateliason.com

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

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  The papers claiming Spinosaurus was a diver or a strong swimmer rest on very weak evidence at best.

  Their words

  So Spinosaurus is a super weird and exaggerated version of what was already a kind of super weird group of theropods. So Spinosaurus is properly strange. And then, as you kind of hinted at, super controversial as well, because various papers have claimed it's a diver or a really good swimmer, and I think the evidence for that is very weak at best.

  youtube.com

Technology analyst whose weekly email on tech reaches over 150,000 readers. Publishes essays and an annual presentation on where the industry is going.

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  Around a tenth of people use a chatbot daily and another fifteen to twenty per cent weekly, far below the headline adoption figures.

  Their words

  It's like something around 10% give or take three or four percent of people depending on the survey are using this say they're using this every day. Another sort of 15 to 20% of people say they're using it every week.

  youtube.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

  Their words

  One of my favorite papers about prompt injection is Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

  simonwillison.net

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

From one piece Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #472 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  His prediction that research-level mathematics papers would be written in collaboration with AI by 2026 has already come true.

  Their words

  There are certainly math results which could only have been accomplished because there was a human authentication and an AI involved, but it's hard to disentangle credit. I mean, these tools, they do not replicate all the skills needed to do mathematics, but they can replicate some non-trivial percentage of them, 30, 40%, so they can fill in gaps.

  youtube.com

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  When formalising a proof costs no more than writing it, mathematics will flip: papers written in Lean first, and journals refereeing only for significance because correctness is certified.

  Their words

  And that's a phase shift, because suddenly it makes sense when you write a paper to write it in Lean first, or through a conversation with AI, which is generally on the fly with you, and it becomes natural for journals to accept.

  youtube.com

Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.

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  Success on the easy version of a task is evidence of nothing, because it seduces you into believing the model found a general solution when it did not.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Worse, as the latest Apple papers shows, LLMs may well work on your easy test set (like Hanoi with 4 discs) and seduce you into thinking it has built a proper, generalizable solution when it does not.

  A knockout blow for LLMs?garymarcus.substack.com

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

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  Nobody really believes there is a firewall at the event horizon, but the firewall papers were what stopped the field from stalling.

  Their words

  I don’t think anyone really believes that at the event horizon you’ll find a firewall. But it did lead to things like the entangled wormholes embroidering a black hole, which was born out of an attempt to address the concerns that AMPS raised. So it did lead to progress.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief executive of Superhuman, the email client; previously founder of Rapportive, which he sold to LinkedIn; a professional game designer before that.

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  Changing how you run a survey invalidates every number you collected before it: you are starting a new baseline, not continuing the old one.

  Their words

  The key thing is, and this applies to any survey methodology, if you're going to change the method of surveying, all of your old numbers are invalidated. So, it's just a new baseline going forwards.

  youtube.com

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

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  CiteSeer

  Their words

  Online library of research papers.

  worrydream.com

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

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  From Counterculture to Cyberculture

  Their words

  From Counterculture to Cyberculture -- Stewart Brand and his surrounding milieu.

  patrickcollison.com

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

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  Psych

  Their words

  Despite having read a few bookshelves worth of academic psychology texts, I enjoyed Yale professor Paul Bloom's survey of the field. Because understanding psychology cannot be divorced from understanding its history, I enjoyed Bloom's birds-eye view of the field from the past to the present day.

  scotthyoung.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

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  Gatekeeping in science stamps out the best research along with the worst, because reviewers are least likely to approve what is novel or risky.

  Their words

  Reviewers are less likely to greenlight papers and grants if they’re novel, risky, or interdisciplinary.

  Science is a strong-link problemexperimental-history.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

From one piece The rise and fall of peer review 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Peer reviewers miss most of the serious errors in the papers they review.

  Their words

  Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this.

  The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com

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  Fraudulent papers pass peer review routinely, which is direct evidence that peer review does not do the job it is supposed to do.

  Their words

  In fact, we’ve got knock-down, real-world data that peer review doesn’t work: fraudulent papers get published all the time.

  The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  Default cloud backup has quietly put a copy of nearly everyone’s private papers in a few data centres, and that is a surveillance weapon.

  data centers

  Their words

  It terrifies me, because these data repositories are not only a risk to individual user privacy, they’re effectively a surveillance super-weapon.

  Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Future Ethics

  Their words

  Bowles' 2018 book provides a useful survey of the various problems tackled by this nascent field, and the frameworks that have emerged to tackle them.

  calnewport.com

Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.

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  Pre-grant peer review predicts which research will have impact substantially better than chance does.

  Their words

  I have reviewed before the effectiveness of peer review at figuring out "what's good" in the context of grant awards, finding that peer review as currently practiced does substantially better than chance at predicting future impact, especially for the most impactful of the papers; but at the same time is is far from perfect, leaving plenty of variance unexplained.

  nintil.com

Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Adobe Acrobat Reader

  Their words

  To read papers, I use Adobe Acrobat Reader and sync them in the cloud. This lets me read, highlight, and sync my papers across devices (work laptop, personal laptop, iPad). Instapaper does the same for online articles.

  eugeneyan.com

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  Instapaper

  Their words

  To read papers, I use Adobe Acrobat Reader and sync them in the cloud. This lets me read, highlight, and sync my papers across devices (work laptop, personal laptop, iPad). Instapaper does the same for online articles.

  eugeneyan.com

Former options market maker who writes Moontower, a newsletter on trading, volatility, decision-making and how to think about risk outside markets too.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Eat Stop Eat

  Their words

  I read Brad Pilon’s Eat Stop Eat which gives a comprehensive survey of the research around IF. It’s my go-to rec for people interested in the topic.

  moontowermeta.com

Wine writer and Master of Wine; Financial Times wine columnist, editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine and co-author of The World Atlas of Wine.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  World Atlas of Wine

  Their words

  The World Atlas of Wine has unrivalled maps. Hugh did a fantastic job, the real spadework, of getting some top quality maps of the world's classic wine regions and many of the new ones. The original editions had Hugh's matchless prose, trying to encapsulate the spirit of each region in surrounding texts, but the maps are the thing, and some photographs.

  fivebooks.com