BOOKS & Links

What They Are, How They Work and Where They Came From

1. A jargon free explanation of how AI large language models work

2. Foundations of Large Language Models

3. The Moment We Stopped Understanding AI (AlexNet)

4. The Busy Person’s Intro to LLMs (Andrej Karparthy)

5. Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI, Anil Ananthaswamy

6. Helen Toner’s LLM explainer

7. Anthropic Interpretability explainer

8. Ilya Sutskever’s AI reading list for John Carmack

9. Quick assessment of the various models (March 2024)

10. The Bitter Lesson

11. Gwern on Scaling

How to Use Them?

1. Andrej Karparthy’s guide to LLM use cases

2. March 2025 review of model capabilities

3. Why Gemini is actually very good

4. A land use researcher works (successfully) with Deep Research

5. An economist works (successfully) with Deep Research

6. How Tyler Cowen uses the different models

Personal Favourite Use Cases

1. Reading non-English books and creating excellent parallel translations (often better than the published English translations I own) live using Claude on my phone. Very natural to have your phone with you when you read, and easy to read one aside the other. Natural chunking into paragraphs also makes it less daunting to read an unfamiliar language.