Ilya Sutskever's 30 Papers vs Monologue

Explore the deep learning reading list Ilya Sutskever gave John Carmack, with free audio explainers for AlexNet, ResNet, Transformers, scaling laws, and more.

Between our turns, we think, and that thinking is what keeps a long conversation coherent, what surfaces real value, what lets us hold a thread across the whole hour.

About Ilya Sutskever's 30 Papers

Explore the deep learning reading list Ilya Sutskever gave John Carmack, with free audio explainers for AlexNet, ResNet, Transformers, scaling laws, and more. These courses, books, and code-heavy pieces do not currently have a ListenDock audio episode. When legendary game programmer John Carmack decided to move into AI, he asked OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever what he should read. Ilya handed him a list of around thirty works and said that learning them would cover 90% of what matters in modern deep learning.

About Monologue

Between our turns, we think, and that thinking is what keeps a long conversation coherent, what surfaces real value, what lets us hold a thread across the whole hour. They may carry frontier-level intelligence, but the moment you put them into a long, high-stakes conversation they bottleneck: no room to reason between turns, no memory of a rule set six turns ago, no coherent thread across half an hour. Monologue lets a real-time voice model think in chunks while the user is still speaking, so its next move is deliberate and informed by everything that came before, without skyrocketing the per-minute price to a level nobody can afford in production.