welcome
Thank you for joining the MEAP for Sutskever’s List. This book is written for readers with a working familiarity with AI concepts and a curiosity that extends beyond the algorithms into the history, strategy, and culture that have shaped modern machine learning. You do not need to be an academic researcher, but some prior exposure to deep learning architectures, whether from hands-on work, reading research summaries, or following AI news, will help you get the most from it.
The book takes you inside a curated set of research papers known informally as “Sutskever’s List,” which Ilya Sutskever once described to John Carmack as covering “90% of what matters today” in AI. However, instead of viewing each paper as a separate contribution, the chapters depict them as interconnected threads within the broader narrative they represent. You will see how technical breakthroughs intersect with organizational decisions, safety debates, and cultural inflection points, and how they continue to shape the systems we use today.
Moreover, this is not just a book about what these models and methods do but as clues to Sutskever’s worldview. It is about why they emerged when they did, what problems they solved, how they interacted with other advances, and what they revealed about the most influential AI researcher of our time. My aim is to give you both a conceptual toolkit for practice and a richer sense of the forces, technical and human, that have driven AI’s evolution.