Reading List
Papers and books that shaped how I think about AI. Trust scores reflect peer review, empirical basis, and reproducibility.
AI Foundations
"Attention Is All You Need"98%
Vaswani et al. · 2017: The architecture everything runs on.
arxiv.org →
"Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models"88%
Kaplan et al. · 2020: Proved performance scales predictably.
arxiv.org →
"Constitutional AI"94%
Anthropic · 2022: Aligning AI with principles instead of human labels.
arxiv.org →
"The Bitter Lesson"82%
Rich Sutton · 2019: General methods that leverage computation always win.
incompleteideas.net →
"Situational Awareness"72%
Leopold Aschenbrenner · 2024: Where AI goes by 2027. Speculative but rigorous.
situational-awareness.ai →
"Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence"85%
Bubeck et al. · 2023: Early GPT-4 eval that forced the field to take emergent abilities seriously.
arxiv.org →
"Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning"90%
Wei et al. · 2022: Showed that making models think step-by-step actually works.
arxiv.org →
Agent Trust & Governance
"Practices for Governing Agentic AI Systems"92%
OpenAI · 2023: The closest thing to an industry playbook for agent guardrails.
openai.com →
"The Landscape of Emerging AI Agent Architectures"88%
Masterman et al. · 2024: Taxonomy of agent patterns when the field was still figuring it out.
arxiv.org →
"Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools"86%
Schick et al. · 2023: Models that learn when and how to call APIs. The agent foundation.
arxiv.org →
"ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting"91%
Yao et al. · 2022: Think, then act, then observe. The loop every agent uses now.
arxiv.org →
"Human-Level Control Through Deep Reinforcement Learning"85%
Mnih et al. · 2015: The original human-in-the-loop paper that started the agent revolution.
nature.com →
"Governing AI Agents"80%
Chan et al. · 2024: Best current framework for who's responsible when agents act autonomously.
arxiv.org →
Multi-Agent Systems
"AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications"87%
Wu et al. · 2023: Microsoft's framework that made multi-agent conversations practical.
arxiv.org →
"Communicative Agents for Software Development"83%
Qian et al. · 2023: ChatDev: agents playing roles to ship software. The multi-agent blueprint.
arxiv.org →
"Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior"90%
Park et al. · 2023: 25 AI agents living in a town. Changed how we think about memory and autonomy.
arxiv.org →
VC & Startup Strategy
"Venture Deals"88%
Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson · 2019: The term sheet bible. Read it before any fundraise.
venturedeals.com →
"The Power Law"85%
Sebastian Mallaby · 2022: How VC actually works, told through the people who built it.
amazon.com →
"Zero to One"82%
Peter Thiel · 2014: Contrarian thinking on monopolies and secrets. Still holds up.
amazon.com →
"Blitzscaling"78%
Reid Hoffman · 2018: Growth-at-all-costs playbook. Useful framework, apply with caution.
blitzscaling.com →
Operator & Building
"The Hard Thing About Hard Things"90%
Ben Horowitz · 2014: No playbook for the hard parts. This is the closest thing.
a16z.com →
"High Output Management"92%
Andy Grove · 1983: Written 40 years ago, still the best book on running teams.
amazon.com →
"Working Backwards"84%
Bryar & Carr · 2021: Amazon's operating system: PR/FAQs, bar raisers, input metrics.
workingbackwards.com →
"An Elegant Puzzle"86%
Will Larson · 2019: Engineering management for people who actually build things.
lethain.com →
AI Business & Strategy
"Prediction Machines"80%
Agrawal, Gans & Goldfarb · 2018: AI as cheap prediction. Simple thesis, surprisingly useful.
predictionmachines.ai →
"AI Superpowers"76%
Kai-Fu Lee · 2018: US vs. China AI race. Dated on details, still right on dynamics.
aisuperpowers.com →
"The Coming Wave"82%
Mustafa Suleyman · 2023: AI + biotech containment problem. Best big-picture risk framing.
the-coming-wave.com →
"Co-Intelligence"88%
Ethan Mollick · 2024: The practical guide to working with AI. No hype, just patterns that work.
oneusefulthing.org →