Keeping up with papers

Follow specific accounts on X that curate, summarize, and share papers – e.g., Rohan Paul, _akhaliq.

Once you come across a paper you find interesting, use tools like Copilot, ChatGPT or Google AI Studio to ask targeted questions:

• “Summarize this paper for a software engineer”
• “Summarize this paper for a 5-year-old”
• “What are the most novel ideas in this paper?”
• “Explain the key idea from the paper in pseudo-code”

If you want to catch up while multitasking (cleaning dishes or walking your dog, for example), Google Notebook LM’s audio-overviews are excellent. NotebookLM also lets you ask specific questions about a paper’s contents.

My daily habit is to check EmergentMind for new and interesting papers. They provide summaries, links to authors and YouTube videos, and related discussions on X you can join (which can be fun).

AlphaXiv is an underrated way to stay on top of papers. It offers topic-based communities for discovery and discussion, plus an AI assistant for Q&A. This is the second service I visit almost every day.

Ultimately, reading papers is about building a habit. Over time, you start connecting dots across papers, forming your own map of ideas in the latent space that shapes how you think about problems.