The 376 AI Sources We Monitor
We scan 376 sources. 80% of what matters comes from 17 of them. Here’s the full breakdown.
Layer 0: The 17 Curators (Read These, Skip Everything Else)
These humans already filter 500+ articles/week. We’re curating from curated content.
| Newsletter | Why They’re Tier 0 | Frequency | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ben’s Bites | Best daily AI roundup, builder-focused | Daily (weekdays) | Quick scan of what shipped yesterday |
| Latent Space | Deep builder content, AI engineering interviews | Weekly + bonus drops | Understanding how production AI actually works |
| Simon Willison | Hands-on, tries every new tool himself | Daily (multiple posts) | Spotting tools worth trying before they trend |
| Import AI (Jack Clark) | Weekly deep analysis from Anthropic co-founder | Weekly (Mondays) | Policy + research that affects your roadmap |
| The Batch (Andrew Ng) | Industry analysis from the most connected person in AI | Weekly (Wednesdays) | Big-picture industry trends |
| Ahead of AI (Sebastian Raschka) | Visual guides to ML internals, training techniques | Biweekly | Understanding what’s actually happening inside models |
| Lenny’s Newsletter | Product strategy, growth, operator insights | Weekly (Tuesdays) | PM/founder decision-making frameworks |
| Not Boring (Packy McCormick) | Makes complex business/tech topics fun and deep | Weekly (variable) | Company deep-dives, market narratives |
| Stratechery (Ben Thompson) | Analytical frameworks for tech business | Daily (paid) / Weekly (free) | Strategic thinking about platform shifts |
| ByteByteGo | System design, engineering at scale | Weekly | Architecture decisions for AI infrastructure |
| a16z | VC analysis, tech strategy from Andreessen Horowitz | 2-3x/week | Where smart money is flowing |
| a16z Speedrun | How to build startups fast | Monthly | Tactical startup execution |
| The Generalist | Deep company profiles | Weekly | Understanding how specific companies think |
| NEW ECONOMIES | Tech trends reshaping industries | Weekly | Spotting industry-level shifts early |
| OnlyCFO | SaaS metrics, financial strategy for founders | Weekly | Unit economics, fundraising strategy |
| Bay Area Founders Club | VC signal, founder events | 3x/week | Bay Area deal flow, networking signal |
| The Leverage | AI-first business building | 2x/week | Practical AI business models that work |
Layer 0b: New Additions Worth Watching
These earned their way onto our radar in 2025-2026. Not yet Tier 0 but close.
| Newsletter | Why We’re Watching | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| The Rundown AI | Grew to 1.75M+ readers. Concise daily summaries with an agent-focused angle. | Daily |
| AlphaSignal | 180K+ subscribers. Trending GitHub repos + research picks. Very technical. | Weekly |
| TLDR AI | Good for tracking LLM compression, synthetic data, hardware shifts. Straight to the point. | Daily |
| Superhuman AI | AI tools and productivity workflows. Less technical, more applied. | Daily |
| AI++ Newsletter | Agents, MCP implementations, dev tools. Builder-focused. | 2x/week |
| Augmented Coding Weekly | AI-assisted development, coding agents, IDE integrations. | Weekly |
| Future Tools (Matt Wolfe) | 300K+ subscribers. New AI tool launches, practical demos. | Weekly |
| One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick) | Wharton professor who actually experiments with AI. Not theoretical. | 2-3x/week |
Layer 1: Primary Builder Sources (8 sources)
Company blogs that announce things you need to know:
- Anthropic Blog (anthropic.com/blog) — Claude releases, computer use, safety research, system prompts
- OpenAI Blog (openai.com/blog) — GPT releases, API updates, product launches, pricing changes
- Google AI Blog (blog.google/technology/ai) — Gemini, DeepMind, research breakthroughs
- Hugging Face Blog (huggingface.co/blog) — Open-source models, community benchmarks, new architectures
- Vercel Blog (vercel.com/blog) — AI SDK, v0, agent deployment patterns, scaling stories
- LangChain Blog (blog.langchain.dev) — LangGraph, agent frameworks, production patterns
- Product Hunt (producthunt.com) — New AI launches daily. Noisy but catches things blogs miss.
- TechCrunch AI (techcrunch.com/category/ai) — Funding rounds, launches, acquisitions, shutdowns
Layer 1b: Real-Time Trending (HN + Reddit)
Hacker News API
- Scans top 100 stories every fetch
- Filters for AI/ML/agent keywords
- Only surfaces stories with 50+ points
- 500+ points = automatically Tier 1 (these are the stories everyone will be talking about)
- We pull comments too. The HN comment on an AI paper is often more useful than the paper.
Reddit (15 subreddits)
Core AI builder subs:
- r/AI_Agents (agent architectures, tool use, MCP)
- r/AgentsOfAI (agent builder community)
- r/MachineLearning (research, papers, benchmarks)
- r/LocalLLaMA (open-source models, quantization, self-hosting)
- r/ClaudeAI (Claude tips, API tricks, prompt engineering)
- r/ChatGPT (GPT usage patterns, plugin ecosystem)
- r/LangChain (LangChain/LangGraph implementation questions)
Niche but high-signal:
- r/vibecoding (the vibe coding movement, AI-native development)
- r/openclaw (OpenClaw community)
- r/clawdbot (Claude bot development)
- r/Startup_Ideas (startup validation, market gaps)
- r/singularity (long-range AI predictions, sometimes prophetic)
Added in 2025-2026:
- r/AItools (tool discovery, workflow sharing)
- r/PromptEngineering (prompt techniques, jailbreaks, system prompts)
- r/artificial (general AI news, policy discussion)
Podcasts (10 Shows for Builders)
Podcasts catch things newsletters miss. Founders say things on mic they won’t write down. Here are the ones worth your commute.
| Podcast | Hosts | Why It’s Good | Best Episode Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| Latent Space | Swyx + Alessio Fanelli | Most technical AI engineering pod. 10M+ listeners/year. | Deep-dive interviews with builders |
| The Cognitive Revolution | Nathan Labenz + Erik Torenberg | Biweekly. Interviews with researchers and founders on the frontier. | ”Live Player Analysis” episodes |
| No Priors | Sarah Guo + Elad Gil | VC + researcher perspective. Cuts through hype effectively. | Candid takes on what’s real vs noise |
| Practical AI | Daniel Whitenack + Chris Benson | Weekly. Makes AI approachable without dumbing it down. | ”Fully Connected” news episodes |
| Machine Learning Street Talk | Tim Scarfe et al. | Top technical AI podcast on Spotify. Pure nerd content. | Paper deep-dives |
| The TWIML AI Podcast | Sam Charrington | Long-running. Great guest roster of researchers and practitioners. | Interview format |
| Last Week in AI | Andrey Kurenkov + Jeremie Harris | Bi-weekly roundup. Covers news + ethical debates. | News summary episodes |
| The AI Podcast (NVIDIA) | Noah Kravitz | Industry applications. Healthcare, robotics, enterprise. | Industry-specific deep dives |
| Gradient Dissent | Lukas Biewald (W&B founder) | ML practitioner interviews. Infrastructure-heavy. | ”How we built X” episodes |
| Lenny’s Podcast | Lenny Rachitsky | Not AI-specific but covers AI product strategy increasingly. | Founder/PM interviews |
YouTube Channels (8 Worth Subscribing To)
YouTube is where demos live. Reading about a tool is one thing. Watching someone build with it is another.
| Channel | Subscribers | Why It’s Good |
|---|---|---|
| Two Minute Papers | 1.5M+ | Research paper breakdowns in 5-10 min. The thumbnails are clickbait but the content is solid. |
| Andrej Karpathy | 900K+ | When he posts (rarely), it’s essential. “Let’s build GPT” has 10M+ views for a reason. |
| The AI Grid | 400K+ | In-depth demos of new AI software. Shows you the tool, not just talks about it. |
| Matt Wolfe | 800K+ | AI tool reviews, weekly news roundups. Good production quality. |
| Tech With Tim | 1.2M+ | Python + AI development walkthroughs. Actually builds things on camera. |
| AI Jason | 300K+ | Agent building tutorials. LangChain, CrewAI, practical implementations. |
| Sam Witteveen | 100K+ | Underrated. Deep technical content on embeddings, RAG, fine-tuning. |
| Prompt Engineering | 200K+ | Despite the name, covers much more than prompts. Good API tutorials. |
Discord Communities (6 That Matter)
Discord is where you find out about things 48 hours before they hit Twitter/X. These are the ones with actual builders, not just hype posters.
| Community | Members | Signal Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic Discord | 50K+ | Claude API help, building with Claude, research discussions. Official staff participate. |
| OpenAI Discord | 200K+ | GPT API, Sora, plugin development. Noisy but the Developers’ Corner channel is good. |
| Hugging Face Discord | 60K+ | Open-source model discussions, fine-tuning help, community benchmarks. |
| LangChain Discord | 40K+ | LangGraph questions, agent architecture, production deployment help. |
| Cursor Discord | 30K+ | AI-assisted coding, .cursorrules sharing, workflow optimization. |
| Vercel Discord | 25K+ | AI SDK, v0, deployment patterns. Active core team members. |
Layer 2: Background Sources (21 sources, weekly only)
Individual builders, community, research. Runs weekly for niche coverage.
Individual Builders
Chip Huyen (ML engineering, production systems), Lilian Weng (deep research explainers), Eugene Yan (ML systems, RecSys), Turing Post (agentic workflows)
More Newsletters
GenAI.works (daily generative AI tools), Ahead of AI (ML research, LLM training)
Community & News
Hacker News, The Verge AI, Ars Technica, MIT Tech Review
Reddit Deep Scan
Same 15 subreddits but with lower upvote threshold (catches niche discussions the daily scan misses)
Dead or Declining Sources
Things that used to be good but aren’t worth your time anymore. We still monitor some of these in case they recover.
| Source | What Happened | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Most “AI tool directory” sites | Flooded with affiliate spam and pay-to-play listings by mid-2025. Signal died. | Dead |
| Generic “AI news” Twitter/X accounts | Algorithmic feed changes in 2025 made these unreliable. Same content recycled across 50 accounts. | Declining |
| Medium AI publications | Paywall changes + flood of AI-generated articles. Hard to find real signal. | Declining |
| Google News AI topic | AI Overviews cannibalized traffic. Publishers reduced output. The feed itself got thinner. | Declining |
| r/ChatGPT (as primary source) | Grew too large. Mostly “look what ChatGPT said” screenshots now. Still monitor for breaking news only. | Moved to background |
| Most AI Substacks started in 2023 | The “everyone is an AI writer” wave crested. Many stopped publishing or went months between issues. | Mixed |
| LinkedIn AI content | Engagement farming with AI slop. The platform actively rewards generic takes. Unusable for curation. | Dead |
What We Filter Out
94 articles auto-removed per batch. Patterns:
- Consumer tech (iPhone tips, Samsung reviews, cable TV)
- Sports, fashion, recipes, celebrity news
- Linux desktop, window managers, filesystems
- Beginner tutorials, generic listicles
- Academic papers with no practical application
- AI-generated roundup posts that just rehash other newsletters
How to Use This List
- Subscribe to the Layer 0 newsletters. This is 80% of your reading. Set up a dedicated email folder. 20 minutes/day.
- Pick 3-4 podcasts. Listen during commute or exercise. Latent Space + Cognitive Revolution + No Priors covers most of it.
- Join 2-3 Discord servers. Anthropic + LangChain + one more based on what you build. Mute everything except announcements and help channels.
- Follow the 15 subreddits. Create a custom Reddit feed. Check it once in the morning.
- Ignore everything else. We monitor it so you don’t have to. Seriously. The fastest way to fall behind is trying to read everything.