The five-angle expedition produces a striking coincidence: a small set of voices dominates every category. Andrej Karpathy [1], Simon Willison [2], Sebastian Raschka [3], Nathan Lambert [4], Gergely Orosz [5], Ethan Mollick [6] and swyx (Shawn Wang) [7] each appear in the long-form blog list, the YouTube/long-form-video list, the X follow list and the podcast list. When three independent curation runs converge on the same names, that is the signal — start there in whichever medium you actually consume.
Consolidation, not fragmentation. Several canonical names have gone dormant: Lilian Weng’s Lil’Log (last post May 2025), Chip Huyen’s blog (Jan 2025), Adrian Colyer’s the morning paper (Feb 2021), Charlie Guo’s Artificial Ignorance (discontinued when he joined OpenAI Jan 2026) [8]. Output has compressed onto a smaller set of working practitioners who post more, not more people who post less. The Latent Space brand specifically is widening from one podcast into a network with AINews integration in 2026 [9] — one node, more surface area.
The hype filter is now its own tier. AI YouTube has packaging-driven channels whose creators openly admit “outrageous” thumbnails are clickbait that “work” [10], which makes counter-programming voices like AI Explained and AI Daily Brief disproportionately valuable [11]. The same dynamic plays out on X — follower-count rankings surface Sam Altman and Lex Fridman (4.2M each) [12], but practitioner-curated lists never lead with them. Subscribe by signal, not reach.
A 2024–2026-specific tier exists: agent-builders shipping on camera. IndyDevDan, Cole Medin and Sam Witteveen building Cursor / Claude Code / n8n pipelines with companion GitHub repos [13] didn’t exist as a category three years ago. This is the slice of the list most likely to look different in 2027 — bookmark loosely and re-curate yearly.
Stack discipline is the operational lesson. Every angle independently arrives at the same advice: cap your inputs. Five X follows is plenty [14]; two newsletters in the inbox with the rest in RSS [15]; one podcast for builders + one for thinkers + one for craft [16]; one daily aggregator + one weekly deep-read [17]. And drop anything unopened for 30+ days, regardless of medium.
Open questions the five angles leave on the table. The list leans heavily Anglosphere — ChinaTalk [18] is the only Chinese-AI-ecosystem voice in any category, despite the policy weight and open-model centre of gravity that DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM and MiniMax now carry, visible in r/LocalLLaMA’s traction patterns [19]. The other gap: AI safety / alignment as a daily beat is thin outside Lambert and the long-form interview podcasts. If either lens is load-bearing for your work, this expedition won’t cover it — needs its own pass.