How to Build an AI Information Diet Worth Trusting
There is more written about AI every day than anyone could read in a year. The answer is not to keep up. It is to curate. A practical guide to a feed that makes you sharper instead of just tired.
In 1971, long before the internet, the economist Herbert Simon wrote a line that reads like it was meant for 2026: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Information, he observed, consumes something, and the thing it consumes is the attention of whoever receives it. The richer the information, the poorer your attention becomes. Nowhere is that truer than in artificial intelligence, a field that now produces more threads, papers, hot takes and product launches in a single day than you could properly digest in a month.
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. — Herbert Simon, 1971
The instinct is to try to keep up. Follow more people, open more tabs, subscribe to everything. It does not work. You end up busier, more anxious and no better informed. The people who genuinely understand where AI is heading do the opposite. They curate ruthlessly. Here is how to build a diet that compounds instead of drains.
Follow builders, not broadcasters
The single most useful filter is to weight people who ship over people who post. Someone building real products, publishing real research or running real teams will tell you things the pure commentators cannot, because they have paid for the knowledge. Broadcasters optimise for engagement. Builders optimise for being right, because they have to live with the consequences. When you find someone who does the work and explains it plainly, that account is worth ten that only react to the news.
Prize the ones who admit uncertainty
In a young, fast-moving field, confidence is cheap and calibration is rare. Be suspicious of anyone certain about everything, and hold on to the people who say "I am not sure" and "this changed my mind." Honest uncertainty is the mark of someone actually paying attention rather than performing expertise. The loudest voice in the room is almost never the best informed one.
Mute the hype, and the doom
AI coverage tends to split into two exhausting genres: everything is about to change forever, and everything is a fraud about to collapse. Both are engineered to trigger a reaction, and both are usually wrong in the same way, by mistaking a headline for a trend. Curate away from the extremes and towards the people who talk in specifics, in trade-offs, in "it depends, and here is what it depends on."
Choose depth over feed
A single thoughtful long read will teach you more than fifty scrolled posts, and it will still be true next month. Anchoring your diet in a small number of deeper sources, a couple of newsletters, a few essays, one or two people who write at length, gives you a foundation the feed never can. The feed is for noticing what is happening. Depth is for actually understanding it.
Audit it every quarter
An information diet rots if you never clean it. Every few months, look at what you actually follow and ask one blunt question of each source: has this made me sharper, or just busier? Cut anything that fails. You are not being rude, you are protecting the scarce resource Simon identified half a century ago. Attention spent badly is simply gone.
The point you keep forgetting
The goal was never to consume all of it. That race is unwinnable and always was. The goal is a small, high-quality set of inputs that leaves you genuinely informed and with attention to spare for the thing that matters most, which is doing your own work. A sharp diet compounds quietly. A noisy one just tires you out and calls it being informed.