Week 2·Week 2 in the Syllabus →

AI Infrastructure

Compute

• RequiredThe Plunging Price of Thought (40 min)Epoch AI (2026)
• RecommendedAI’s $600B Question (6 min)David Cahn (2024)
• OptionalGen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?Goldman Sachs (2024)
• OptionalLLM Inference Prices Have Fallen Rapidly but Unequally Across Tasks (3 min)Epoch AI (2025)
• OptionalEnergy and AIInternational Energy Agency (2025)
• OptionalDeep Dive on the 3 Big Bottlenecks to Scaling AI Compute (Dwarkesh Podcast) (2 hr 31 min)Dwarkesh Patel and Dylan Patel (2026)
• OptionalData on AI Data CentersEpoch AI (2026)
• OptionalThe AI Ecosystem Stack — Market Map (6 min)Suhas Pai and Hudson Labs (2026)

Models

• RecommendedOpen Source AI Is the Path Forward (10 min)Mark Zuckerberg (2024)
• RecommendedDeepSeek FAQ (25 min)Ben Thompson (2025)
• OptionalOpen vs. Closed AI: How Far Behind Are Open Models? (30 min)Epoch AI (2024)
• OptionalIntroducing GPT-5 (15 min)OpenAI (2025)
• OptionalUnderstanding the AI That Drives Robots (24 min)Brian Potter (2026)
• OptionalThe Landscape of AI (30 min)Kevin Bryan (2026)

Data and Context

• RequiredLetter to Shareholders: “AI, Data and Technology Are Key to the Future” (5 min)Jamie Dimon (2026)
• RecommendedThe Law of Leaky Abstractions (10 min)Joel Spolsky (2002)
• RecommendedContext Engineering (2 min)Simon Willison (2025)
• OptionalPrompt EngineeringLee Boonstra, Google (2024)
• OptionalEffective Context Engineering for AI Agents (14 min)Anthropic (2025)

Tools and Agents

• RecommendedBuilding Effective Agents (12 min)Anthropic (2024)
• RecommendedAgentic Design Patterns (3 min)Andrew Ng (2024)
• OptionalWhy Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs (45 min)Gwern Branwen (2016)
• OptionalAgentsJulia Wiesinger and others, Google (2024)