Finding alpha in AI
Curating the high quality information is difficult in a landscape rich with hype and spin. Here are four forward thinkers who consistently deliver alpha in the AI space.
Locating genuinely high-quality information about the latest in AI can feel overwhelming. Liking drinking from a firehose. With all of the self-promotion, repetitive content, relentless hype, and outright fraud, pinpointing reliable sources is a challenge.
But staying at the forefront of AI advancements isn't optional—it's essential for anyone serious about maintaining a competitive edge.
Here are four consistently high-quality, authentic voices worth your attention:
1. Matt Shumer — Co‑founder & CEO, HyperWrite (OthersideAI)
Shumer leads HyperWrite, known for its AI‑powered writing assistant and for developing Reflection‑70B, an open‑source LLM that gained attention for its “reflection‑tuning” self‑correction method, positioning it among the strongest public models (VentureBeat). A Forbes 30‑Under‑30 alum, he shares hands‑on demos, prompts, and benchmarks on X, making advanced language‑model research accessible to builders and marketers alike (HyperWrite | AI Writing Assistant). Most recently, he released ShumerPrompt.com which immediately led to a burst of AI influencers sharing his prompts as their own (part of what triggered this post).
2. Yohei Nakajima — Creator, BabyAGI & GP, Untapped Capital
VC‑turned‑coder Nakajima open‑sourced BabyAGI, a lightweight framework that sparked the autonomous‑agent boom by showing how tasks can recursively spawn subtasks toward a goal (GitHub). He writes frequently about agent design and how non‑technical founders can prototype AI workflows rapidly.
3. Matt Palmer — Head of Developer Relations, Replit
Palmer fronts Replit’s mission to make “coding the new literacy,” producing live streams and tutorials that show anyone—novice to pro—how to ship full‑stack apps with Replit’s built‑in AI agent and one‑click deployment. Blending empathetic dev‑education with product strategy insights, he’s become a thought leader on how generative AI collapses the gap between idea and running software for millions of developers.
4. Ethan Mollick — Professor, Wharton School; Author, Co‑Intelligence
Mollick studies how AI reshapes work and education, distilling research into his newsletter One Useful Thing, now followed by nearly 300 k readers (One Useful Thing). Named to TIME’s “100 Most Influential People in AI,” he champions a “hands‑on” rule—ten hours with a frontier model for everyone—and provides empirically grounded guidance to educators, executives, and policymakers on deploying AI today (time.com).