A few good ways to pass it on

A useful way into the frontier AI argument

Frontier AI Orientation is a free, source-backed map for people who want to understand advanced AI without pretending certainty. It starts with a four-source compass and a fuller nine-source briefing, then opens four deeper tracks: mechanisms and measurement, economics and applications, building and governance, and the full risk argument. Keep Current remains a separate maintenance layer. Readers can track progress, save private notes, share Wordle-style checkpoints, ask a chatbot grounded in completed sources, and try seven small demonstrations of failure modes and model behaviour.

Open the orientation

Ways to introduce it

Five honest reasons to send it on

The anti-vibes AI syllabus: primary sources before conclusions.
A risk reading list that tracks what you read instead of scoring what you believe.
What a normal, technically curious person needs to read before the jargon becomes useful.
Private notes that can become an ephemeral notes-only summary and a shareable checkpoint.
Can one line of nonsense make Pong, and can six tiny labs make model failure modes legible?

Five screenshots

Moments worth sharing

Click any image for the full-size JPEG. They are ready for a newsletter, a post, a conversation, or coverage. The risk-meter capture uses a balanced demonstration reading state.

**The four-source front door**Start Here offers a four-source compass or a fuller nine-source briefing before four deeper tracks.Download JPEG

**Progress worth sharing**A reading checkpoint becomes a grid, an image card, or a short reflection with a link back.Download JPEG

**Ask the map**The logged-in chatbot answers from the reading map and the sources that reader has completed.Download JPEG

**The Pong magic prompt**One absurdly small, fixed prompt asks the model to make a playable browser game. Basically just magic.Download JPEG

Copy and adapt

Short introductions

Short enough to read aloud, plain enough to make your own without doing violence to a sentence.

A quick introduction

Most AI arguments start at the conclusion. Frontier AI Orientation starts with a four-source compass, offers a fuller nine-source briefing, then opens four deeper tracks for mechanisms and measurement, economics and applications, building and governance, and the full risk argument.

Risk and disagreement

The clever part of this AI risk reading list is that it does not ask what you believe. It tracks which side you have actually read, then points out when your evidence diet is drifting.

For builders

If you know how to use ChatGPT but not why any of this works, the technical track walks from transformers and scaling laws through RLHF, tool use, agents, and the practical work of shipping systems that do not quietly fall over.

Progress and notes

Every source can be checked off, annotated privately, and turned into a shareable progress grid. Once enough notes exist, the AI can produce an ephemeral summary using only the reader's own notes.

Pong

This may be the least dignified AI demo in the curriculum: one fixed prompt says "pong now. rectangle friendships. ball doink." and asks the model to return a playable browser game.

Useful and slightly strange

Five things to point out

01 Risk meter Balances completed risk-case and skeptical sources, then politely notices a one-sided reading diet. 02 Progress grid Turns a reading checkpoint into a Wordle-style grid, image, or plain-text reflection. 03 Pong magic prompt A fixed nonsense prompt generates a playable game and keeps score on a tiny leaderboard. 04 Private notes summary For signed-in readers: summarises a reader's own notes in one to five sentences, using only those notes. 05 Source-backed chatbot Retrieves relevant curriculum chunks while keeping completed sources as the evidence boundary.