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 Some of the books are not directly linked to technology or are a little bit outdated.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.

“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 While it is already pretty outdated it is still one of the best books to get into the topic of technological singularity.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 A newer version of the book above.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.

“1984” by George Orwell is a dystopian social science fiction novel about an omnipresent surveillance state. The book is even more relevant today than it was when it came out. It is not just a great read, but also a warning of what we have to fight against in the current age.

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.

DrAlanDThompson is a good source for updates on new language model releases and everything around that topic. His opinions are overly naive and optimistic in my opinion though.

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.

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.

Stability.Ai is a company that works on generative models and makes them all open-source. This policy has a huge impact since many of their models are quite powerful like their text2image model stable diffusion or their text2audio model HarmonAi. They also announced an upcoming Language model and supported other organizations.

OpenAi is most famous for its Language models. From GPT-2 up to the upcoming one GPT-4. They also were first with text2image and are one of the leaders in AI research.

Meta is not only the biggest player in the VR space but plays also an important part in AI research and pushes the limit of what XR hardware and software can do. They recently started to open-source a lot of different kinds of AI Models for language and vision.

Mistral AI is a new French AI startup that is developing open-source language models that are trained on a lot of data, which makes them very powerful at a small scale.

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.

Alphabet Inc. does not only include Google and Deepmind but several other companies and labs that work in areas like drug discovery and robotics.

Anthropic is a quite new AI company that developed the LLM Claude. The CEO is Dario Amodei, who worked in leading positions at Google and OpenAI for years.

Inflection is also a new AI lab that works on LLMs. They developed Pi, with a quite different approach. They also acquired a huge amount of computing power for future models. Their CEO is Mustafa Suleyman, who was one of the Co-founders of DeepMind.

Top AI Models for Different Areas

AI King: Gemini 1.5 Pro

LLM:
Open-source: Llama 3 405B / Mistral Large 2
Free: GPT-4o/ Claude 3.5 Sonnet/ Mistral Large 2
Paid: Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Text2Image:
Free: FLUX-dev
Paid: Ideogram 2.0/Midjourney 6.1/FLUX-Pro

Text2Speech:
Free: StyleTTS 2
Paid: GPT-4o

Text2Music:
Free: Udio/Suno