The news, digested. The links, included. A few minutes of reading instead of a week of scrolling.
A few months ago I started doing something almost embarrassing to admit: every week, I’d sit down and try to make sense of everything happening in artificial intelligence. Not because anyone asked me to — because I wanted to keep up, and I was tired of feeling like the world was moving faster than I could read.
What I built for myself turned out to be more useful than I expected — not because I did the digging myself, but because I didn’t have to. The actual research — reading far more than I ever could, sorting out what’s worth knowing — is done by ChatGPT, shaped by a lot of back-and-forth with it over what to look for. My job is deciding what’s relevant enough to keep. Once I started getting something worth reading in an easy format, I kept doing it. And then I started to wonder if maybe it wasn’t just useful to me. That’s Granddaddy’s Research — the notes I get every Saturday, shared with you every Monday.
What This Actually Is
I modeled the format after the old Kiplinger Letter — the kind of briefing that respects your time. No filler, no hot takes, no 4,000-word think pieces. Just the handful of things from the past week that actually seem to matter, why they matter, and a link to the original source if you want to go further than I did. During the 1980s I got a Kiplinger letter every week. It was like getting a Letterman’s Top Ten without the humor. But way better than watching the news.
I’m not a journalist and I’m not an AI researcher. I’m a retired programmer who reads a lot and tries to be honest about what I don’t know. What I bring to this is time, curiosity, and a refusal to just reword a press release and call it analysis. That refusal is basically my job now — I’m the final edit for relevance each week.
Each week’s Brief has four parts:
- Newsworthy — the developments actually worth knowing about this week, explained in plain English, each one linked to where it came from.
- Signals — where separate stories start pointing in the same direction, and what that pattern might mean for what comes next.
- Summary — if I only had room to leave you with one idea to carry into next week, this is it.
- Reviewed for This Brief — the full source list, everything read while putting the Brief together, in case you want to go deeper.