These recommendations are for everyone who wants to learn more about the topics I write about in my blog posts. Some of the books are not directly linked to technology or are a little bit outdated. I tried to give context to why I think every recommendation is worth reading/listening/watching.
Books
“The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Suleyman is a new book from a top-level insider. Suleyman is a co-founder of DeepMind and InflactionAI. In this book, he talks about the upcoming wave of technologies especially AI, and why it is the biggest challenge of the twenty-first century. I agree with a lot of the points and think the book is way more relevant than many others in this list, because of the recency of its release.
“Empire of AI” by Karen Hao goes over the history of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and the darker sides of the recent AI boom. While I would not recommend the book as a standalone introduction to these topics, I think it acts as a good counterweight to the rest of the reading material which often under-represents certain concerns.
“Chip Wars” by Chris Miller summarizes the entire history of the semiconductor industry and its impact on the current global economy and political affairs. It is a must-read if you want to understand the current problems that face the industry.
“A World Without Work” by Daniel Susskind is a must-read for everyone who is working or will be in the next 10 years. It gives a great introduction to the problem of technological unemployment. He explains why it will happen, how it will happen, and what we as a society and as individuals can do to handle it.
“The Future of the Mind” by Michio Kaku is a great Introduction to how the brain works and how we could enhance and manipulate it in the future. The Book is overly optimistic about the applicability of some technologies but gives a good overview of the concepts and Ideas in BCIs and brain research.
“Lifespan” by Prof. Dr. David A. Sinclair goes in depth about longevity research and why humans get older and how to stop it. As a leading researcher in the field, his views are not only interesting but also based on current results and research and therefore even more exciting and believable.
“The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil. I don’t think I need to explain why this book is a must-read. While it is already pretty outdated it is still one of the best books to get into the topic of technological singularity.
“The Singularity is Nearer” by Ray Kurzweil. A newer version of the book above. This one is a bit short but way more up-to-date and a better entry.
“Physics of the Future” by Michio Kaku goes in the same direction then “The Singularity is Near” but is a little bit newer and easier to read. It was my introduction to most technologies that I think about every day nowadays.
“The Universe in a Nutshell” by Stefen Hawking and all his other books are a great introduction to general relativity, quantum physics, and the secrets of the universe. It will answer some, but first and foremost it will cause you to ask many more.
“The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene is the next step if Stefen Hawking made you interested in the big questions of the universe. It gives a more detailed insight into general relativity, quantum physics, and string theory. I read it when I was in high school and it nearly convinced me to study Physics instead of CS.
“Hegel in A Wired Brain” by Slavoj Žižek is a completely different perspective on a future with interconnected Brain-computer-interfaces. I really enjoyed it and was fascinated by looking at the problem though the eyes of someone who thinks very differently to myself.
Youtube
Two Minute Papers is a great source to keep up to date with recent research around machine learning and all kinds of simulation software papers. It is also a good starting point to look into papers that you want to take a look at yourself.
Andrej Karpathy is a leading expert in AI research and is one of the founding members of OpenAi. He is also great at explaining how neural networks work. If you want to understand how chatGPT works or implement it yourself his channel is the perfect starting point.
Dwarkesh Patel is a great Podcast host, with many high-profile guests from the AI industries. The Podcast is more technical but also focuses on the implications of the technologies. Some interviews like the one with Ilya Sutskever are a must-watch.
ThrillSeeker is focused on existing and upcoming VR hardware and software. If you are interested in the “Metaverse” or just VR technology in general, this is your place to go.
AI Explained is a great news channel that talks about all kinds of AI news.
Asianometry creates videos about the Hardware industries and anything around it.
Machine Learning Street Talk is a podcast where different AI researcher talk about their field of study. More technical but still interesting even if you are not that familiar with the technology yet.
Other online sources
SemiAnalysis is an independent research and analysis company specializing in the Semiconductor and AI industries. Best news source to understand the current semiconductor landscape.
Companies
Deepmind is owned by Alphabet Inc. and is one of the leaders in Artificial intelligence. Some of the biggest breakthroughs in the last few years came from Deepmind, like Alphazero, Alphafold, and Alphatensor and AlphaProteo. Their LLM Gemini is also one of the top models.
Alibaba has a chinese AI lab that creates open source language models. They release very good open source models and released the first open source reasoning model QwQ. Their current model seres Qwen 3 is leading in their size classes.
OpenAi is most famous for its Language models. From GPT-2 up to GPT-5. They also were first with text2image and are one of the top AI labs.
Meta is not only the biggest player in the VR space but plays also a part in AI research and pushes the limit of what XR hardware and software can do. They recently to open-source a lot of different kinds of AI Models for language and vision including their SAM models.
Mistral AI is a French AI startup that is developing language models that are trained on european data, which makes them very interesting for local companies.
Amazon is most known as an online store, but its real power is its huge amount of available computation. Their AWS service powers some of the biggest businesses in the world like Netflix or Facebook and offers a platform to train and deploy AI systems. They also train their own text and image AI models.
Alphabet Inc. does not only include Google and Deepmind but several other companies and labs that work in areas like drug discovery and robotics. They are leading in AGI research and produce the Gemini models.
Anthropic is a AI company that developed the LLM Claude. The CEO is Dario Amodei, who worked in leading positions at Google and OpenAI for years. The company has a strong focus on AI safety and interpretability research.
DeepSeek is another chinese AI lab that mostly releases open source models that are highly competitive and often close to state of the art. They also were one of the first to replicate the o1 reasoning technique.
NVIDIA does not only produce the Hardware that is used to train AI models, they also develop their own models. Most of their work focuses on Simulations and video enhancement, which they use to train robots for example.
Top AI Models for Different Areas
AI King: Gemini 3.0 Pro (Deep Think)
LLM:
Open-source: Kimi K2 Thinking / GLM-4.7
Proprietary: GPT-5.2 / Gemini 3.0 Pro / Claude Opus 4.5
Text2Image: Nano Banana Pro / open source: Z-Image-Turbo
Text2Video: Kling 2.5 Turbo 1080p
Text2Speech:
Eleven v3 / MiniMax Speech-02-HD
Text2Music:
Suno v5