Skip to content
All tags

#academia

2 posts

Ahead of AI: How a Scholar Built 200K Subscribers by Publishing Monthly, Not Daily

Computational biology PhD turned UW-Madison professor Sebastian Raschka launched Ahead of AI on Substack in 2022, publishing monthly deep dives into LLM papers and architectures. Four years later: 200K+ subscribers, zero sponsorships, and a book-newsletter flywheel that proves low frequency and high depth can win in a crowded AI newsletter market.

Who Submits to Top AI Conferences: Labs, Companies, and the Global Map

The institutional map of top AI conferences is being rapidly redrawn. Industry labs dominate frontier model development—nearly 90% of notable models came from industry in 2024—but academia remains the largest source of highly cited research. Chinese universities went from challengers to nearly half of NeurIPS paper volume in five years, while OpenAI and Anthropic have nearly vanished from conference author lists. The decoupling of publication volume from research capability is the defining signal.