AI Engineer Reading List for 2025, Guide to NotebookLM, and AI Encryption

Tools and industry news from the world of artificial intelligence.

Jan 20, 2025

Morning y’all!

I hope you had a restful weekend! We’re more than halfway through January and I hope you’ve built the momentum that you wanted for this new year!

And I totally forgot that today’s a Holiday in the US; you know, the Inauguration and all that good jazz which half of this country is excited for and the other half not so much.

😬

Cool af custom keyboards. Not really AI but very neat.
ComfyUI now supports NVIDIA Cosmos.
AI phishing targets executives.
AI use cases within the security division of GitLab.
The inherent limits of pre-trained LLMs.
The AI Engineer Reading List for 2025.

Self-hosted AI coding assistant.
Cursor has raised more than $100m for it’s coding tool. To be honest, this is the only coding assistant that I’m presently paying for and I’ve been more than impressed with the results so far. Yes, worth the 4 cups of Starbucks-priced coffee I’ll sacrifice per month but I can manage that.
Open source workflow automation.
AI-guided interview prep.
This video on NotebookLM isn’t terrible:

AI room styler so you can have an amazing room…?
Hairstyles for you via AI.
Your easiest go-to Avatar creation tool. I’m going to check this out.
Qwen chat is free with an interface. It can’t seem to tell me the weather though.
The use of ChatGPT for teens in school is rising.
Perplexity tried to partner and merge with Tiktok?!

A month with Devin, a code editor in the browser. Apparently it’s not great.
AI end-to-end encryption.
AI agents are taking over the advertising world. Everything seems to reduce down to advertising dollars, right? We’ve seen this before.
AI testing tool for your app and website.
Sales assistant tool.