How I keep up with AI progress

Despite the feeling that it's a fast-moving field, most of the differences in actual models over the last years are in degree and not kind, and the majority of ongoing work is in tooling and integrations, which you can probably keep up with as it seems useful for your work. Remembering that it's a model of text and is ungrounded goes a long way to discerning what kinds of work it's useful for (where verification of output is either straightforward or unnecessary), and what kinds of work it's not useful for.

- Someone made a slightly different tool for using LLMs (may or may not be useful depending on whether existing tools meet your needs)

- Someone made a model that is incrementally better at something, beating the previous state-of-the-art by a few % points on one benchmark or another (interesting to keep an eye on, but remember that this happens all the time and this new model will be outdated in a few months - probably no one will care about Kimi-K2 or GPT 4.1 by next January)

I think most people can comfortably ignore that kind of news and it wouldn’t matter.

On the other hand, some LLM news is:

- Someone figured out how to give a model entirely new capabilities.

Examples: RL and chain of thought. Coding agents that actually sort of work now. Computer Use. True end-to-end multimodal modals. Intelligent tool use.

Most people probably should be paying attention to those developments (and trying to look forward to what’s coming next). But the big capability leaps are rare and exciting enough that a cursory skim of HN posts with >500 points should keep you up-to-date.

I’d argue that, as with other tech skills, the best way to develop your understanding of LLMs and their capabilities is not through blogs or videos etc. It’s to build something. Experience for yourself what the tools are capable of, what does and doesn’t work, what is directly useful to your own work, etc.

A lot of people are feeling HN is saturated with AI posts whether it is how MCP is like USB-C (repeated so much you know it is NPCs) or how outraged people are that their sh1t fanfics are being hoovered up to train AI.

This piece is not “news”, it’s a summary which is tepid at best, I wish people had some better judgement about what they vote up.