# Show HN: Ilya's 30 papers, explained in audio > Source: > Published: 2026-07-09 22:10:03+00:00 THE AI READING LIST # Ilya’s 30 papers as audio The famous list of papers Ilya Sutskever gave John Carmack. He said, “If you really learn all of these, you’ll know 90% of what matters today”. The audio episodes explain the key insights, giving you a clear overview of every chapter before reading the full PDFs. ## Listen to the episodes AI-narrated, key-insights chapter by chapter. Free to stream and download. ## Also on the list Courses, books and code-heavy pieces that don’t fit an audio episode — read them at the source. - Article ### The Annotated Transformer Sasha Rush et al. (Harvard NLP) · 2018 - Book ### Kolmogorov Complexity and Algorithmic Randomness A. Shen, V. Uspensky, N. Vereshchagin · 2017 - Course ### CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition Andrej Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li et al. (Stanford) · 2016 - Book ### Machine Super Intelligence Shane Legg · 2008 - Paper ### A Tutorial Introduction to the Minimum Description Length Principle Peter Grünwald · 2004 ## THE STORY As the story goes, when legendary game programmer **John Carmack** (Doom, Quake) decided to move into AI, he asked OpenAI co-founder **Ilya Sutskever** what he should read. Ilya handed him a list of around thirty papers and said that if Carmack really learned all of them, he’d understand **90% of what matters** in modern deep learning. Carmack has confirmed the exchange in interviews, though he’s said the original list was lost. The version circulated today was reconstructed by the community from his and others’ recollections. It’s a remarkably coherent tour from convolutional and recurrent nets, through attention and Transformers, to scaling laws and the information-theoretic roots of learning. Reconstructions and background: [community reading list](https://github.com/dzyim/ilya-sutskever-recommended-reading), [Aman’s AI Journal](https://aman.ai/primers/ai/top-30-papers/), [Ilya’s List](https://gonzoml.substack.com/p/deep-learning-legends-ilyas-list). ## Have a paper of your own? Upload any PDF or paste a link and ListenDock turns it into a clear audio episode. [Turn a paper into audio](/pdf-to-mp3)