How I keep up with AI progress

If you have a decent understanding of how LLMs work (you put in basically every piece of text you can find, get a statistical machine that models text really well, then use contractors to train it to model text in conversational form), then you probably don't need to consume a big diet of ongoing output from PR people, bloggers, thought leaders, and internet rationalists. That seems likely to get you going down some millenarian path that's not helpful.

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.

To be honest, this even is mostly true in the research side of things. Granted, 99% of research has always been incremental (which is okay! Don't let Reviewer #2 put you off). Lots of papers are filled with fluff. That is, if you have a strong background understanding these systems (honestly, a math background goes a long way to genearlizing this as lots of papers are just "we tried this math idea" and if you already knew it, you'd have a good guess as its effects).

I think it is easy for it to feel like the field is moving fast while it actually isn't. But I learned a lesson where I basically lost a year when I had to take care of my partner. I thought I'd be way behind when coming back but really not much had changed.

I think gaining this perspective can help you "keep up". Even if you are having a hard time now, this might suggest that you just don't have enough depth yet. Which is perfectly okay! Just might encourage you to focus on different things so that you can keep up. You can't stay one step behind if you first don't know how to run. Or insert some other inspirational analogy here. The rush is in your head, not in reality.