AI # 13 - AI Resources (updated)

My list of indispensable AI blogs, podcasts, personalities and education resources. Updated with 11 new sites/links.

Update: July 2025

AI continues to change at an amazing rate. Trying to keep up is tough even for the insider-experts. I originally published this list of my favorite AI resources in December 2024. Since then, I’ve discovered new gems worth sharing, and I’ve updated this post to reflect what I’m using and learning from today.

These podcasts, newsletters, tools, and courses help me stay sharp as I grow my skills in AI and ML.

(new) - means I added this since my December post.

Podcasts

(new) Dwarkesh Patel - Amazing wunderkind (24 years old as I write this) podcaster. Has interviewed serious heavy hitters, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair (yes, that Tony Blair), Satya Nadella (CEO Microsoft). Not dedicated to AI but touches often.

(new) Lex Fridman - Another amazing podcaster. Super smart interviewer, scientist and Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Unique in the world of podcasting: goes very long and deep (episode with Elon and the Neuralink team was 8.5 hrs + !!), quiet calm voice, very thoughtful. Not dedicated to AI, but touches often.

Last Week In AI – founded by a Stanford grad with a PhD in AI. Hosted by super smart
duo, Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris, who share headlines and deeper stories.

The AI Daily Brief – quick daily hits. Interesting and informative.

The Super Data Science Podcast – more focused on the field of data science but also has some great interviews, for instance recently with Andrew Ng of Deepmind.AI and Coursera. Fantastic host Jon Krohn.

Newsletters

(new) Ethan Mollick - respected prof. at the Wharton School and AI expert. I’m starting to hear and read more and more from Mollick.

(new) Ethan Holland - I’m just getting acquainted with this one. A HUGE assortment of news every week. MUST be AI collated (?) given the breadth of info.

Don’t Worry About the Vase by the incredible Zvi Mowshowitz, a fascinating and prolific writer. Economist and Magic: The Gathering gaming pro (as in played as a professional). ** NOTE: you can also find this in ‘podcast’ form. It’s not really a podcast, but an audio version of the written blog voiced by an ElevenLabs bot.

Top AI Chat Models (LLMs)

(new) Meta AI - Meta’s (formerly Facebook) research group building cutting-edge AI models like Llama, with a big focus on open science and sharing their work with the world.

(new) Deepseek - New model out of China; made waves in early 2025 due to its high performance at a lost cost/price point.

(new) Kimi K2 - new model out July 2025. High test results so far, known for good creative writing.

ChatGPT – the big guys on the block, top chat LLM. Part of OpenAI offerings, with large investments from Microsoft. (I have a paid subscription)

Claude – Advanced LLM by Anthropic, a company started by OpenAI alum and focused on safety/alignment. Very good with code. (I have a paid subscription)

Perplexity – A powerful model which places reference links for all of its output, emphasizing sourcing for its LLM responses.

XAI – Elon Musk’s AI from X. Interesting and sometimes zany. I’m waiting for the “Unhinged” model to come out soon. Really, Google it.

Gemini – Google’s frontier model. Ver. 2.5 Pro is really impressive. If Google is going to stay relevant in the new, fast moving world of AI this is it.

NotebookLM – a unique take on LLMs. You can feed in up to 50 large documents and even YouTube videos and ask questions about the data contained therein.

AI Tools (new)

I’ve added a new section in July 2025 for tools I find interesting or must-have.

(new) Gamma - for making slides easy and fast.

(new) Higgsfield - for making still images into short AI video.

Education & Courses

(new) - Alpha School. This is not for AI education per se, but using AI in “traditional” education settings. And it’s local to Austin, where I live. Great piece by Zvi on Alpha School. Raises so many interesting ideas and questions. Read a parent’s in-depth review of the school here. (I have not read this yet, it’s 18,000 words!)

(new) Huggingface – Learn and share AI tools and models. Like GitHub for AI, it's where tons of cool models, datasets, and tools live, and anyone can use or share them.

(new) Kaggle.com - large community for learning and AI contests, some with huge cash prizes. I competed in one of the competitions (and wrote about it).

(new) Agents - free 4-hour technical course from Ed Donner and Jon Krohn on how to build agents. Get ready for some Cursor, Python and API work. Highly recommend.

DeepLearning.AI (Coursera) – deeplearning.ai was founded by Andrew Ng, one of the pioneers in AI and machine learning education. Many of the courses, like the highly-regarded Deep Learning Specialization, are hosted on Coursera.

University of Texas – McCombs School of Business – Post-Grad Program in AI and Machine Learning – the seven month course I took through UT (finished April 2025). Highly recommend. I thoroughly enjoyed this course and learned a ton of fascinating and practical things. The mathematics of AI and how LLMs and transformers work blew my mind.