AI stuff I read, watched and listened to in 2025

In 2025 I spent an inordinate amount of time looking LinkedIn. My feed is predictably absolutely filled with AI hype and nonsense, but I still find it an interesting barometer for what’s going on. It became really quite difficult for me to miss the latest Claude update, Gemini release or barrage of ChatGPT hype.

For the most part, I can’t find myself joining in with this narrative. It’s way too fast moving. If you sat there trying to keep up with the news you wouldn’t do anything else. I’m also not the greatest fan of the hype, so if you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll generally get a fairly ambiguous or balanced view - because fundamentally the adoption of AI is itself always going to be a set of trade offs.

But I also don’t really need to read TechCrunch or other news sources to understand what’s going on. There are more than enough creators/influencers etc to fill this void, although I regularly doubt their accuracy. But who do I follow and remember consistently? Alex Banks is probably the most sensible of the lot, although not immune from the hype cycle.

Linas Beliūnas gives into rather more of the OMG!! kind of posting, but he’s consistent and on top of the AI news. Last for this section, I like reading Heather Murray’s posts. For a starter, she’s a non technical UK based AI entrepreneur - which ticks a few boxes. Also she gives some real insight on how people are practically thinking and using AI, rather than the standard AI LinkedIn post:

From the shallows of social media to the depths of actually reading something rather than skimming. Although, in fact, I listen to most of my books now as it’s just a bit more convenient.

All of my book reading/listening also focuses on the macro side of AI rather than anything practical. I want to form some sort of picture of what could happen, rather than worrying too much about what is happening.

Few of these are brand new. My first listen was Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, which was in fact published more than 10 years ago. I’ve never listened to a non-fiction book quite like it - the chapter on ‘An AI takeover scenario’ inspired one of my first YouTube videos. It’s pretty philosophical, particularly in the second half - but the first half is extraordinary. I also gave Bostrom’s Deep Utopia a try - but I found the format all a bit silly. One to come back to perhaps.

Next was Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Nearer, which was another big hitter. Kurzweil is certainly a techno optimist, but while I find the idea of us all heading into the Singularity at ‘some time in the 2030s’ mildly disconcerting, it is so well laid out that I find it more than plausible.

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In a similar vein is Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of AI. It’s a more accessible book than either of those mentioned so far, but takes a slightly different approach because Tegmark is a cosmologist. His rational reasoning of why he thinks we’re alone in the universe is a particularly compelling passage.

Bostrom’s Superintelligence is certainly alarming, but not quite as much as Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’ If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. In fact, Yudkowsky was quite the influence on Bostrom’s AI takeover scenario. I quite liked it, and thought it made some good points… but I found some of the stories that led into chapters, and the tone generally, slightly childish and off putting.

You couldn’t say that of Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Inside the reckless race for total domination, which as a piece of journalism is an incredibly in depth work. It is able to cover the OpenAI story in remarkable detail - but how much detail is too much? While I found it fascinating, the level of scrutiny on basically everything got a bit tedious. I get it, it’s trying to compare the technological race to the age of empires - but it doesn’t always work.

There were a couple more, but that’s quite enough to get your teeth into over Christmas.

Given my fairly active listening to audiobooks, I don’t really have much headspace for podcasts as well. But one I do regularly tune into is the Dwarkesh podcast - and that’s because every episode is basically a mini audiobook of 2+ hours, and seriously in depth. Also, because it’s a conversation, many fairly abstract topics are well broken down.

He’s got plenty of the big names on too. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has been on twice this year. If you watch Dwarkesh on YouTube he’s got a strong beard to boot, which is always worth an honourable mention.

I’ve watched rather a lot of YouTube this year to understand automation. I think this was really split three ways. Out of them all, I probably watched Jono Catliff the most and I’m not entirely sure why. It’s probably because he’s pretty down to earth, and a kind of nervous presenter - but it’s easy to sit back and just watch him and pick stuff up without having to overly focus. Most of my time in front of the TV is, of course, spent distracted by the sea of AI hype on LinkedIn.

A more confident presenter is Jack Roberts, who I really learned the very basics of Make through his Skool community.

Third up, and the most diverse and advanced of the three, is Ben AI. His video This 20+ AI Agent Team Automates ALL Your Work got me thinking differently about how to build agent teams - and has more than 500k views over the course of this year. For an automation video, that’s big, really big.

Of course, you can also watch my channel too. Fewer tutorials these days, more documentary style explainers. I’ve done 13 videos so far.

Ah, how could I forget. The one you’re reading right now is obviously the best. Other than that, there are loads. But if I had to pick one out of the 5 or so I receive every day, I’d pick Mindstream. It just seems to have a bit more personality than most of the others.