“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed”
A 100% free library to boost your career or start a business
Every resource in this hub is free and hand-picked by me with the goal of advocating for equitable access for everyone looking for success with their career or small business.
The impact of AI on all aspects of the economy and working life has become impossible to ignore so I want this site to also be foundational for anyone wanting to understand the AI-driven shifts reshaping how we work, whether you want to adopt it or not. Alongside career tools, templates, and job boards, you'll find a growing AI Explainer Hub, a directory of the leading AI labs and models, and honest, sourced coverage of what AI actually means for the job market.
I add new resources every day to give you foundational (and critical) knowledge of today's chaotic labor and commerce marketplace.
3017 resources and counting · 100% free
Find a free programMake sense of AISee every question people have asked
Built and hand-maintained by Justin Smith, a career & business coach — see my background
What is the Launchpad Library?
The Launchpad Library is a 100% free collection of career and small-business resources hand-picked by career and business coach Justin Smith. It gathers job boards, internships, templates, tools, courses, live events, and articles in one searchable place, with new resources added every day.
- Free: no account, payment, or subscription ever. I do my best to steer clear of resources that are paywalled or have subscription fees to stay true to my mission.
- Searchable: find anything by topic, format, or date.
- Current: hand-checked and added to daily.
New to AI? Start here
A plain-language page on what these tools actually do, the risks that reach ordinary people looking for work, and eight questions for telling a real number from a sales number, without the hype or doomerism.
Who's Who
Full profiles of the researchers, critics, founders and career voices behind the ideas in this library, including a short bio, key works and their resources here.
Jobs
Career guides, hiring trends and official salary data, grouped by field of work and the newest job boards worth your time.
Go straight to your situation
Each one opens the hub already filtered to the resources that fit your situation.
Follow the AI conversation
AI & Tech
Models, people, ethics, news, and what it all means for your work — all sourced, dated, and presented without taking a side.
AI Explainer Hub
Start here. Real questions about AI — what to use, who to follow, what the concerns are, and what it means for your career — answered with real sourcing. Or jump straight to the jargon decoder.
Start with a questionWho's Who in AI
The people actually building, leading, and critiquing AI — frontier lab leaders, disruptors, researchers, and critics — presented without picking a side.
Meet the voicesAI Models & Tools
Every major AI model compared on price, benchmarks, and what it's actually good for — plus open-source tools you can run yourself.
Tech & Ethics
Research and investigations, watchdog organizations, voices worth following, and the newsletters covering this beat — plus where I land on using AI as a tool rather than as gospel.
Explore the collectionAI & Your Career
What AI is actually doing to the job market, which skills are rising, and what to prepare for — pulled from the same sourced library as everything else here.
Read the evidenceLatest AI News
Fresh headlines from every publication in the library.
See all news Lab Watch: official lab announcementsCurious how this site is actually built? Read how I built this.
Latest Tech Drops
- Tech Drop
Google Unveils a Gemini Agent for Work That Takes Objectives, Not Instructions
Announced at Gemini at Work 2026, Google's enterprise agent works across Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Chat and Calendar, connects to company systems, and includes finance and legal tools, according to Google. “You give it objectives, not instructions,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
- Tech Drop
OpenAI Rolls Out GPT-6 in ChatGPT, With Answers That Can Include Charts and Forms
Announced October 7, GPT-6 brings what OpenAI calls Intelligent UI: responses that can include charts, forms and small interactive tools. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise get GPT-6 Sol first; Free and Go get GPT-6 Luna the next day. OpenAI says GPT-6 Instant starts answering web-search questions 44% sooner than GPT-5.6 Instant.
- Tech Drop
Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5, Its Cheapest and Fastest Small Model Yet
Announced October 7, Haiku 5.5 is built for high-volume, cost-sensitive work like summaries, classification and live customer support, and as a subagent alongside Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 on coding. Anthropic says it costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 and is its fastest model to date; it's also the first Haiku with effort controls to trade cost against intelligence per task. Available on the Anthropic API and AWS Bedrock.
- Tech Drop
Tab Opens a Private Beta for an AI Agent You Text in Messages
Tab, from Terrasoft, is an agent you text to get tasks done: it uses its own computer and browser, can make phone calls, edit files and media, and place orders. Terrasoft says nothing is paid until you approve the purchase. Access is by waitlist; pricing and the underlying model are not disclosed.
- Tech Drop
Study: AI Agents That Cave to the Majority Still 'Remember' Their Original Answer
In a new arXiv paper (Oct. 2), researchers had scripted AI peers unanimously push a wrong answer in a debate. Agents that switched answers often still held their original reasoning step internally, detectable inside four open-weight models. The paper is not peer-reviewed.
- Tech Drop
Mistral Launches Public Preview of Mistral Large 4, a 1-Trillion-Parameter Open-Weight Model
Announced October 6, Mistral Large 4 (“Le Chonk”) is a natively multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 1 trillion total parameters and 49 billion active, trained from scratch on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in Mistral's own European datacenters. Mistral says it's state-of-the-art among open-weight models on enterprise workloads like cybersecurity, finance and law. The API preview is live on Mistral Studio today; full weights are due by the end of October.
- Tech Drop
Reflection AI Unveils Beam, a 501B Open-Weight Model Built for Coding and Agents
Announced October 5, Beam is Reflection's first open-weight model — a sparse mixture-of-experts with 501 billion total parameters and 23 billion active, trained with one of the largest open-lab RL runs to date (100M+ rollouts on 10.5K NVIDIA GB300 GPUs). Reflection says it matches GLM 5.2 on reasoning with 3–4× less inference compute. Weights, technical report and model card are due later this month after final red-teaming.
- Tech Drop
ElevenLabs Launches Eleven v4, Its Most Expressive Voice Model Yet
Eleven v4 and the real-time v4 Turbo read a script the way a voice actor would — tracking who's speaking, what just happened, and how each line should land — with emotion tags, audio events, and multi-speaker scenes. Available in apps, API, and agents, with a free try on the site.