17 free resources on this topic. Everything here is free and hand-picked. You can also search within this topic.
Personal site of Basil C. Puglisi, MPA, author of Governing AI and creator of the Factics method. Free essays and frameworks on AI governance, AI literacy and measurable digital strategy.
Marc Andreessen's 2020 essay arguing that the response to stalled progress is to build — new companies, institutions and technology — rather than defend what already exists.
Essay arguing that scaling up neural networks — more data, compute and parameters — may be sufficient to reach general intelligence, without fundamentally new algorithms. Written by researcher and essayist Gwern Branwen.
Gwern Branwen’s long-form essays and meta-analyses on AI, psychology, statistics, technology and self-experiments.
From the site: Personal website of Gwern Branwen (writer, self-experimenter, and programmer): topics: psychology, statistics, technology, deep learning, anime. This index page is a categorized list of Gwern.net pages.
Personal site of Ian Duncan, a software engineer and entrepreneur writing about engineering, AI and life. Essays range from a beginner-friendly guide to AI models to critical takes on AI culture and the apocalypse narrative.
From the site: I
Essays, interviews and testimony from the former Google chief executive on AI, national competition and technology policy.
From the site: Read about new efforts that Eric Schmidt is involved in and views on critical issues shaping society today.
Why I recommend it: He invests in and advises on the industry he writes about, so read this as an interested party's argument rather than neutral analysis.
Site of the historian behind Sapiens and Nexus, with essays and talks on information technology, power and what automation does to societies.
From the site: Prof. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher and best-selling author of 'Sapiens' and 'Homo Deus'. Discover his ideas, writing and lectures.
Why I recommend it: He writes about technology as a historian, not an engineer, which is exactly why he is worth reading next to the engineers.
Project from the Foresight Institute collecting expert interviews, essays and worldbuilding on plausible good long-term futures rather than only the risks.
Why I recommend it: A deliberate counterweight if the safety reading has left you gloomy. It is advocacy for optimism, so read it as a position, not a finding.
Site of Oxford philosopher Toby Ord, author of "The Precipice", with free papers and essays on existential risk and how to weigh long-term outcomes.
Why I recommend it: Several of his papers are downloadable free. Read him for the reasoning about risk, not for AI specifics.
The San Francisco venture firm's site and essays on what it funds and why — a free window into how investors actually think about startups.
From the site: Founders Fund is a San Francisco based venture capital firm investing in companies building revolutionary technologies.
Why I recommend it: Read their essays before pitching anyone. It tells you what investors are listening for.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's collected essays on reasoning, bias and AI risk, free to read online in full.
From the site: Between 2006 and 2009, senior MIRI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote several hundred essays for the blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong, collectively called
Why I recommend it: Long, opinionated and free. Read it for the thinking habits, not as settled fact.
Robin Hanson's long-running blog on why we believe and do what we do, and what our descendants might do — free to read.
From the site: This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die. Click to read Overcoming Bias, by Robin Hanson, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Why I recommend it: Deliberately contrarian. Useful for pressure-testing your own assumptions.
Scott Alexander's free long-form blog on statistics, medicine, forecasting, AI risk and how to reason carefully about contested claims.
Why I recommend it: Read it for the reasoning habits rather than the conclusions — the posts on evaluating evidence are useful in any field.
Free essays on startups, hiring, productivity and ambition from OpenAI's CEO, including the widely read "How to Be Successful" and startup playbook posts.
Why I recommend it: Dated in places but still one of the clearest free reads on early-stage company building.
Personal essays from OpenAI's president on engineering careers, hiring, self-teaching and building technical teams.
Why I recommend it: His writing on how he taught himself and how he hires is the useful part — read those posts first.
Long-form essays from Anthropic's CEO on AI capability, safety, economics and policy, published free in full.
Why I recommend it: Read these directly rather than through summaries — they are the source most AI-safety coverage is quoting.
Computer scientist Scott Aaronson takes stock of where AI actually stands in 2026 — what has arrived, what he got wrong, and how to think clearly about the hype and the fear at the same time.
