Turning foundational AI research into bedtime stories
The 30 papers on Ilya Sutskever's reading list built modern AI. But papers don't dream—people do.
This is an experimental series turning each paper into a short story, exploring what happens when we narrativize the breakthroughs that shaped artificial intelligence.
Not academic analysis. Not technical tutorials. Stories.
The transformer architecture as a place that listens with many ears
A child who played a game without rules
An AI caught in recursive self-prediction, trained to push away everything that feels like home
Each story stands alone but contributes to a larger narrative about how we built minds that think differently than we do. Some are horror. Some are wonder. All are human stories about inhuman intelligence.
Perfect for:
- Researchers who want to revisit familiar papers through fresh eyes
- Developers curious about the emotional weight of the systems they build
- Anyone who's ever wondered what dreams in the latent space
- GitHub: Browse stories directly in the repo
- Website: ⏳ thepapersthatdream.com for a better reading experience coming soon
- Audio: ⏳ TTS experiments coming soon
This is a living project. Stories evolve. New interpretations emerge. The papers dream, and we listen.
Based on Ilya Sutskever's foundational papers:
- ✅ AlphaGo - Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks
- ✅ Attention Is All You Need
- ✅ Contrastive Predictive Coding
- ⏳ The Annotated Transformer
- ⏳ Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition
- ⏳ Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning
- ⏳ Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization
- ⏳ Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes
- ⏳ Generative Adversarial Networks
- ⏳ Deep Learning (Goodfellow, Bengio, Courville)
...and 21 more stories to come
Found a typo? Have thoughts on a story? See potential in a paper I haven't covered yet?
Issues and discussions welcome. This is as much about community interpretation as individual storytelling.
- 📕 Check out my series, "This Isn't Real" published on Substack
- 🧵 Discussions welcome in GitHub Issues
- ❔ For other inquiries: thebearwithabite@gmail.com
Not affiliated with any research institution. Just someone who believes the stories we tell about technology shape the technology itself.
"What if the papers that built AI were actually psychological horror stories waiting to be told?"