The 5 Most Popular AI Blogs to Stay Ahead of The Curve

Like it or not, AI is saturating the world around us. From health insurance providers using AI to process claims, to businesses using AI for customer service, to AI creating the content you read, summarizing the content for you so you don't have to read it, and writing your responses to it, it's everywhere. It's reaching out and touching every facet of our world.

Today, I'm not here to talk about whether or not that's good or bad. Whether you're a proponent of AI and want to stay up to date, or you're an opponent and want to know your enemy, you need to have the best and most updated information you can. The only question is, where do you get that information? What resources can you read that are knowledgeable and trustworthy?

I've put together a list of AI blogs it's worth following. Even if you don't read everything they publish in depth, just knowing what they cover and the trends going on in AI can be valuable. I've also tried to get a variety of perspectives here, so we can all see the world from many different angles. There are also a bunch of other options I've found that didn't make the top five, but I still wanted to mention. Let's dig into the list!

#1: First-Party Resources

I'm cheating a little bit on this one because I'm making #1 not a specific blog but a class of blogs.

There are a million companies investing in AI today, but when you drill down to it, the vast majority of them are just making use of the same handful of APIs and whatever custom prompting they add as a shell over top. To put it lightly, the perspectives and opinions of the second-stringers who just build up their shells aren't nearly as valuable as the information coming from the actual creators of the AIs themselves.

Who are the big players, and what blogs should you follow to keep on top of their news?

• OpenAI's blog. Perhaps the biggest leader in AI is, of course, OpenAI. Their content ranges from new product announcements to their conceptual and practical goals to deeper dives into the products they offer. While they're very obviously biased and not above exaggeration, it's still critical to know what they're saying and doing.
• Google's blog. Much to their chagrin, Google has been playing catch-up since OpenAI first released their technology. They're coming closer to parity, and they're definitely approaching the AI space from a different angle. It's also absolutely critical for any marketer like me to keep an eye on what Google is doing with technology.
• Anthropic's blog. Anthropic are the makers of Claude, which isn't the biggest AI out there, but tends to be one of the most innovative in certain spaces. Their blog is mostly product announcements, but their occasional more analytic posts are very useful.
• Microsoft's blog. Microsoft is trailing in the AI space, but they're also leveraging their saturation with Windows to push their products to a more widespread - and less AI-educated - audience than the other platforms. Their blog is insanely biased (a puff piece on Blackrock, really?) but it's still a decent resource to keep tabs on what MS is doing.

There are other AI systems out there as well, so any one that is relevant to your particular workspace is a good one to follow. Keep an eye on what they're doing and what they're saying, see how other AI platforms respond (or don't respond) to it, and build a sense of what the major players are doing.

#2: ZDNET

If you only follow one blog that covers AI, make it ZDNET. ZDNET isn't just an AI blog, of course. They're a tech and business blog that has existed for over 30 years. With truly global coverage of tech and business topics, they're quite possibly one of the best, most trustworthy, and most authoritative blogs in the entire space.

When it comes to AI, ZDNET pulls no punches. Since they cover topics from a variety of different angles, they aren't wholly puff pieces for OpenAI, nor are they scare pieces from anti-AI activists. They tend to focus on the practical realities, including both the benefits of using AI systems and the potential challenges you face if you choose to adopt them.

If you want to read only their coverage of AI, you can use this link to follow just the AI, machine learning, and automation section. It's still a little broader than other blogs - they cover robotics here, too - but it's more focused than just watching their homepage. Still, I recommend reading about business, security, and tech content, as well as AI content, because it's all useful to see.

I will say that if you're looking for practical advice on using AI systems, or on developing your own, you won't get it here. ZDNET is a lot more about the product announcements, tech testing and analysis, the cultural and social analysis, and other higher-level reporting, not the ground-level mechanics of using and abusing AI systems.

#3: Analytics Vidhya

Analytics Vidhya is an India-based AI resource hub and learning center. In addition to widespread coverage of different AI systems and a blog that keeps tabs on the industry as a whole, they also have a variety of expert sessions, courses, "learning paths" deep-dive guides, and even upskilling courses and other resources.

In my view, there are three drawbacks to this blog.

The first is that it's Indian. I have nothing against India or its tech experts - many of whom are industry leaders - but there's a certain geographic perspective that differs on a fundamental level. If you aren't aware of that going on, you might find your knowledge base ends up a little skewed in subtle ways you might not realize until it causes friction for you. Even little things like subtle differences in terminology can be relevant down the road.

The second is that it is, as you might expect, immensely biased in favor of AI. There's little, if any, discussion of the pitfalls, roadblocks, or social, ethical, and legal issues of AI. There's more to AI than just being another tool, and that's an important aspect of the overall industry that you need to keep aware of.

The third is that they have paid contribution challenges, so a lot of their content is both incentivized and not necessarily written by the experts you think it is. While there's a lot of good information on this blog, there's also a significant amount of "buyer beware" content, and it can be hard to tell which is which until you're deep in a post.

Overall, it's a fine blog to add to a list of blogs to follow, but it shouldn't be the only one you read.

#4: BAIR: Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research

BAIR is one of the current leading-edge research groups studying AI from an outsider's perspective. These are people who are asking serious questions about AI, studying the output of the various AI systems, and developing reports about their results.

Other blogs on this list are going to tell you about a new AI tool, or about how AI can help streamline your content production or business analytics, or how to develop a tool based on an AI API. BAIR is going to tell you about the benchmarks in AI jailbreaking, the linguistic and racial biases inherent in AI systems, and the progress of developing reliable AI detectors.

Basically, BAIR is a tempering force in the industry, and it's extremely important to be aware of the issues they cover. AI systems are a reflection of both their creators and the content used to train them, and that means they amplify the biases of those sources. Numerous AI systems have been demonstrated to have inherent racism and other deep flaws - flaws that the major AI blogs aren't just ignoring, they're downplaying - and BAIR helps bring attention to those problems.

A lot of the posts on the Berkeley AI Research blog are very deep dives and are frequently very technical, so it's not exactly light reading, but I highly encourage any and every AI proponent to spend a few weeks reading about these issues and what they mean for the future of AI and culture itself.

MIT also has its own version of this kind of research group, and I recommend them as well.

#5: MarkTechPost

MarkTechPost is another pretty comprehensive resource, similar to ZDNET but focused entirely on AI. They do a little bit of everything; a scroll through their front page shows you topics like red teaming AI, news reports on Meta and IBM AI systems, summaries and analyses of AI papers from MIT and Berkeley, and more. It's a great bird's-eye view of AI, with a range of useful content.

They do occasionally have more casual blog posts, like "the top 10 use cases for X AI system for business" and the like, but they aren't really the main attraction. There are other, better blogs for that kind of purpose.

Other Blogs to Follow

Since the world of AI is huge, and even just small subsections of it can be worth an entire blog to cover, it's kind of impossible to distill the entire industry down into just five blogs. So, here are a bunch of others you can follow, depending on your interests, specialties, and goals.

KDNuggets

KDNuggets is a very barebones kind of site, which is refreshing when you're otherwise immersed in the design trends and aesthetics of Web 3.0. But they're an extremely valuable resource for topics including machine learning, data management and analysis, and AI. Not every post is for everyone! In fact, I'd argue that most people are only going to find about one in ten or so posts valuable. But if one of those posts is aimed at you, it's bound to be a deep and useful resource.

They are generally a pro-AI site, focused less on the hype and more on the technical specifics, addressing the practical challenges at both a data analysis and training level, and at a higher, purpose-focused level, and even on examining the roadblocks faced in implementation, feedback, and response. I tend to read more of their conceptual content than their technical content, myself.

Amazon's AWS Machine Learning Blog

Amazon is diving into its own AI systems, but instead of focusing on a single AI system to compete with the likes of Gemini or ChatGPT, they're working more on the back-end technical systems. They actually have a handful of AI products, and they're working more to include them as business use systems and enterprise tools than general-purpose LLMs. Truthfully, in my view, this is where AI should be focused, but I'm largely in the minority here (as long as the systems make money, anyway.)

Amazon's AWS Machine Learning blog is one of the more technical and detailed AI blogs out there, but with the caveat that it's almost entirely focused just on Amazon's systems. If you aren't really engaged in Amazon's ecosystem, you might not get much out of it. On the other hand, if you work for an enterprise that uses AWS and want to dig into its AI tools, it's definitely a great option.

Niche AI Blogs

Another possibility is some of the more niche-focused AI blogs. For example, Artificial Lawyer covers AI as it is used in legal and law processes and policies. Chatbot's Life is an AI blog focused entirely on the more casual AI chatbots, designed less about customer service and more as assistants and social partners. There are a ton of blogs like this, and I don't think you should read all of them, but pick a couple that fit best with your own industry and goals to read.

Wrapping up, I'm curious what you have to say as well. There are thousands of AI blogs out there, especially since AI proponents have zero qualms about using AI to make the blogs themselves, so it's a pretty tricky field to wade through. Do you have any recommendations for verifiably human-written AI blogs that are useful to keep up with? Let me know!