The Best AI Newsletters
One PhD student’s curated list of 21 newsletters to help you keep up with AI news and research
AI moves fast, both in terms new research and new articles about its applications in business and society. In fact, new research about AI has been growing at a literally exponential rate for the past decade:
As a PhD student focused on AI, it’s been hard to figure out how to keep up with it all. So, over the past few years I’ve sought out and subscribed to a ton of newsletters that help me do that. In this piece i’ll share what I consider to be the best currently active newsletters, with a bit of commentary on why I think they are good.
My criteria are that these newsletters are still active, have at least a semi-consistent release schedule, focus on AI news (as opposed to data science and the like), are newsletters (as opposed to blogs), and are high quality (according to me). They are presented in rough order of preference and are grouped by whether they cover non technical news, AI research, or both.
News
The latest in AI, Robotics, and Neurotech
An excellent daily (!) round up of new articles about AI with ~5 summaries of new articles in each one. Probably my favorite source for being up to date with hot-off-the-press AI news, the articles picks are interesting and the summaries are very well done.
Last Week in AI by Skynet Today | @skynet_today
“Weekly digests of the most interesting and important AI news”
A nice weekly roundup of curated articles about AI, with a focus on non technical coverage about AI advancements, business, and societal impacts. Aside from links with descriptions, also has a ‘Top News’ section with a brief summary of the article’s contents. The most length and comprehensive of any of these newsletters. Full disclosure, I contribute to this one.
Latest: Last Week in AI #131: new AI play, gigantic neural nets, undocumented healthcare AI tools
AI Weekly by Kyle Wiggers | @Kyle_L_Wiggers
“AI Weekly (Connecting the dots: AI, business, and ethics)”
A weekly news roundup hailing from VentureBeat which has a nice set of editorial thoughts up front and roughly a dozen picks of news articles from VentureBeat and beyond. Comes out on Fridays, so I always like to check it out to make sure I did not miss anything interesting.
Latest: An outline for government regulation of AI
“Weekly collection of AI News and resources on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning”
Another weekly-roundup-of-new-articles newsletter, more of a no-thrills roundup of articles but with nice formatting and slightly more out there article selections.
Latest: Issue #234: Privacy and Protection Cybersecurity Special Edition
Eye on AI by Jonathan Vanian | @JonathanVanian
“Weekly analysis at the intersection of artificial intelligence and industry.”
Hailing from Fortune, an unsurprisingly quite professional newsletter. Not quite as comprehensive as ones by other publications, but of course still high quality.
Latest: How A.I. may impact what you eat
TNW Neural by The Next Web | @Neural
“Insider analysis on the biggest breakthroughs and stories in AI”
A slightly more quirky and less lengthy newsletter, not quite as useful for seeing all the latest articles but a fun read nonetheless.
Latest: I got married on the Ethereum blockchain
The Algorithm by MIT Tech Review | @techreview
“Here to help you cut through the nonsense and jargon to figure out what truly matters and where all this is headed, with updates and thoughts on the latest AI news and research (as well as some added magic and memes).”
Another newsletter but a professional publication with lengthy editorial thoughts and great formatting, though much less comprehensive in its article round ups and sadly locked behind a pay-wall. Still, well done, and MIT Tech Review’s articles on AI are some of the best out there.
Latest: Can machines think?
The EuropeanAI Newsletter by Charlotte Stix | @charlotte_stix
“Informs subscribers about the state of European AI and the newest developments with regards to AI governance within EU Member States.”
Semi-regular newsletter all about AI in Europe, as the title suggest. Really well done and a bit more focused on policy analysis on ethics than other newsletters, so well worth subscribing to.
Latest: EuropeanAI Newsletter #62: European AGI + other soundbite
ChinAI Newsletter by Jeff Ding | @jjding99
“Through translating articles and documents from government departments, think tanks, traditional media, and newer forms of “self-media,” etc., ChinAI provides a unique look into the intersection between a country that is changing the world and a technology that is doing the same.”
Another more specialized newsletter, and similarly very well done. A lot is happening in China that is not at all covered by US publications, so this provides a really valuable look into a country that is increasingly leading the way on AI to a similar extent as countries in the west.
Latest: ChinAI #154: Breaking Down SenseTime’s 672-page IPO Prospectus
Research
Papers with Code Newsletter by Papers with Code | @paperswithcode
“Stay informed on the latest trending ML papers with code, research developments, libraries, methods, and datasets.”
The best resource to keep up with trending AI papers, with good summaries and background information. Packs a lot into each edition, though definitely more targeted at AI researchers and practitioners than less technical fans of AI.
“Regular analyses of cutting-edge developments in natural language processing and machine learning.”
A more research-oriented newsletter from NLP researcher Sebastian Ruder, who also writes excellent blog posts about AI. Tends to do a few deep dives into recent developments with a bit more of an opinioned angle. Very detailed and well done, if less regular than others on here.
Latest: #58 — ICML round-up, Open collaboration, CLIP art, Internet augmentation, New GLUE-style benchmarks
Machine Learning Monthly by Daniel Bourke |@mrdbourke
“Keeping you up to date with the Machine Learning industry. Fastest growing monthly newsletter for Machine Learning Engineers.”
Not quite focused on research but rather on practice, but close enough. Once you are past the ad for a course about ML, has a nice roundup of new blog posts and projects/tools for AI practitioners.
Latest: Machine Learning Monthly 💻🤖 July 2021
Research + News
The Batch by DeepLearning.ai | @DeepLearningAI_
“Weekly AI news for engineers, executives, and enthusiasts.”
Excellent more-professionally produced newsletter with detailed summaries and takes on just a few news articles and research papers per week. Plus, some interesting thoughts from AI pioneer Andrew Ng regularly up front.
Latest: Tesla’s Dancing Robot, Adapting to Climate Change, Asking Language Models Nicely, Machine Unlearning
Import AI by Jack Clark | @jackclarkSF
“A weekly newsletter about artificial intelligence, read by more than ten thousand experts.”
A long running newsletter by former journalist and OpenAI employee Jack Clark. Has a fairly limited number of topics each week, but with excellent background coverage and analysis. Plus, a new AI-themed short story every week! A nice way to start the week.
The Gradient Update by The Gradient | @gradientpub
“Biweekly updates covering recent AI news and research”
A newer newsletter by digital magazine The Gradient. More focused on covering just one news story and research paper per week with editor and guest commentary. Also has 5 other news stories and research papers and some tweets in each addition. Goes in-depth and has more discussion by multiple people than most other newsletters. Disclosure: I also sometimes contribute to this one.
Latest: Gradient Update #7: Deepfake Voice Cloning and How Transformers See the World
Weekly Robotics by Mat Sadowski | @WeeklyRobotics
“Weekly Robotics is a technical newsletter with handpicked news, projects (both professional and DIY) related to robotics, drones, space technologies and more.”
A refreshingly not Machine Learning focused newsletter on AI with a nifty variety of news, projects, and research. Does not cover very much per week, but does cover topics most other newsletters don’t.
Latest: Weekly Robotics #159
Deep Learning Weekly by Austin Kodra, Dan Abdinoor, Matthew Moellman
“be the premier news aggregator for all things deep learning. We keep tabs on major developments in industry — new technologies, companies, product offerings, acquisitions, and more — so you don’t have to.”
A more no-thrills round up of various thing without much commentary, but definitely well done and has a nice mix of news, blog posts, software, and new papers.
AI Ethics Brief by Montreal AI Ethics Institute | @mtlaiethics
“Our mission is to democratize AI ethics literacy. We do this by creating tangible and applied technical and policy research in the ethical, safe and inclusive development of AI.”
A more specialized newsletter focused on just AI ethics which packs quite a lot into each edition. Not as focused on news coverage as others on here, but as with other specialized newsletters covers things others don’t tend to.
H+ Weekly by Conrad Gray | @hplusweekly
“All the latest news and articles about AI, robotics, biotech and other technologies that make us more than a human, in one place.
A slick newsletter that covers more of a variety of topics as listed above. Has a pretty limited number of links each week, but does curate its selections well.
The Belamy by Analytics India Magazine | @Analyticsindiam
Shares a curated list of best stories on AI & ML
More focused on industry and practice than others on this list and so of less interest to me, but useful for those interested in getting into the field.
Latest: Data Engineer Salaries, QSim & Databricks 🗿📡🔮
ML Ops Roundup by Nihit Desai and Rishabh Bhargava | @mlopsroundup
“Machine Learning is Software 2.0. What does it mean to develop software in this new paradigm? What new challenges (and opportunities) does this present? This newsletter brings together the best articles, news and papers about these topics.”
A newer newsletter that has a nicely detailed coverage of a mix of research and news related to ML Ops. Mostly useful for practitioners in the field, but very well done.
Latest: Issue #25: Tesla AI Day. Feature Stores. NIST on AI bias. Model monitoring tips. AI and COVID.
And that’s it! There are other AI newsletters out there, but I chose to not include them due to them being vehicles of self-promotion or not being active enough. I hope at least some of these newsletters will be of as much use to you as they have been for me.
Think I missed anything? Feel free to andreyvkurenkov @ gmail.com or @andrey_kurenkov.
