Over the last year and a half I wrote reviews of all of the papers that Ilya Sutskever sent to John Carmack. I started the series when I left my first startup in Aug 2024 as a way to stay sane, and finished the last review just last week. Some of them have made it to the front page of HN! Writing them was a fascinating experience. Even though I've been in AI for ~12 years now, the actual process of putting pen to paper and trying to explain what the papers were about to a less familiar audience was really helpful to clarifying my own thoughts. As a result I think the paper reviews get longer as they go on, oops...

Now that the whole thing is done, I figured I'd share it as one collection. Thanks everyone who followed along, I'm hoping to do reviews of more modern papers going forward :)