7 · Career transitions › Phase 8 › Lesson 3 of 3

Reading papers without a PhD

What this lesson covers

The AI research firehose is a full-time job to keep up with. This lesson is the protocol that keeps you current without drowning — and the ten papers you should read even if you read nothing else.

The outline

1. The 20-minute paper read. Abstract, figures, method, limitations — in that order. When to stop, when to keep going.
2. The three filters. Papers with released weights, papers with released code, papers other practitioners are citing three months later.
3. The sources worth subscribing to. A handful of newsletters, substacks, and threads that do the filtering for you.
4. The ten load-bearing papers. From attention to instruction tuning to constitutional AI to test-time compute. Read these once; the rest builds on them.
5. Reading in public. Why writing a summary is the highest-leverage thing you can do for your own understanding — and your career.
6. When not to read papers. The signs the field is over-indexing on a trend and you should stay in production reality instead.

Coming soon

In outline.