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Links and tools

AI Commentary

There are hundreds – if not thousands – of commentators on AI out there (and I concede I’ve just added one more to that list…) so dig around for those that you find the most informative and engaging. Here are the main ones I follow:

  • Artificial Lawyer  – legal tech and AI news and views from one of the most experienced sector writers in the UK
  • Azeem Azhar (Exponential View) – Azeem and his team write about AI and other important technologies
  • Benedict Evans – Ben’s weekly newsletter covers what matters in tech every week in his newsletter
  • Meaning Alignment Institute – inventors of the Moral Graph; a tool to try to align humans whilst we try to align AI
  • Quantum Gravity Research – where artificial neural network intelligence meets biological neural network intelligence
  • Saihub – a growing repository of information on safe and responsible AI
  • Surrey University’s Institute for People-Centred AI – a multi-disciplinary initiative to put people at the heart of AI
  • The Information – often the source of breaking AI news in US and beyond
  • YouTubers (many of whom can be found on Substack/elsewhere):
    • AI Explained – a relatively technical, but very accessible, commentary on major AI developments. Developers of SimpleBench, a serious attempt to establish a practical and lasting measure of real-world AI performance.
    • All-in Podcast – good-humoured weekly round up of US and international matters by four well-informed US investors that frequently covers AI
    • ColdFusion – Although this channel covers a wide range of tech and business it has some excellent deep-dives into AI
    • David Shapiro – David, who has a technical background, delves into all aspects of AI including tech, philosophy, post-labour economics and broader social impact. He can also be followed on Substack.
    • Dr Alan D. Thompson – an academic but accessible take on AI intelligence, with deep model analysis
    • Robert Miles – an AI safety researcher whose occasional presentations are also very accessible
    • The AI Daily Brief – very useful short-form (5-6 minute) summary of business developments in the AI world
    • Wes Roth – with his dry wit, Wes dives into latest AI tech

Please suggest any links that you think are missing by clicking here.

 

AI Tools

As the products of AI research continue to move out of the lab and into working life, more and more functionality is becoming available to us. Many of these AI-driven tools are available for free, but their full power is only unleashed when you subscribe (from ~£20/month in my experience). It’s an arm race between the big tech companies, all anxious to see a return of their billion-dollar investments, and as users we’re the ones that benefit. The list below is just a selection of the myriad of AI-driven tools out there – and new functionality is being added almost daily.

  • ChatGPT (OpenAI) – arguably the best-known set of LLMs and the tool that brought AI technology into the public arena, triggering the explosion (and hype) around generative AI in the public domain
  • Claude (Anthropic) – one of the most engaging LLMs with various model sizes and particularly popular with coders, and now has live Internet access (rather than relying solely on an ageing training database)
  • Gemini (Google) – very powerful set of LLM tools and after a slightly patchy record in 2024 has taken leaps forward in 2025. Depending on subscription there is also access to the Imagen 3 image generator, which has been used for some of the images on this site, and ‘Deep Research’ which generates in-depth reports in a matter of minutes
  • NotebookLM (Google) – extremely useful tool for distilling and summarising multiple documents. The podcast generator is particular ingenious
  • Perplexity – serious challenger to Google search as this LLM has real-time access to the internet
  • Poe – a web-based tool that allows you to access many different AI tools, some free of charge, including those for image generation like Stable Diffusion

NB: some of these tools have introduced a real-time web search tool (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude) but given that their underlying Large Language Model (LLM) technology is still not 100% reliable, always check the results they give you and be aware that some other models have cut-off dates for their knowledge. That said, we’re witnessing what looks like a fundamental change in the way we’re used to searching online and Google will be watching competitors very closely (ref this Atlantic article about the death of search).