Resource · Directory
Where to explore what’s out there.
Browse everything
The phone books. Good for answering “is there a tool that does X?”. Whether the tool is any good is a separate question.
There's An AI For That
The largest general AI tool database, searchable by the task you're trying to do.
Caveat: Listings are paid-submission and volume-driven. Treat it as a phone book; the featured slots are bought.
Futurepedia
A friendlier, more editorial directory of a few thousand tools, with categories and beginner courses.
Caveat: Openly affiliate-funded, and it doubles as a funnel for paid courses.
Product Hunt: AI
The daily launch platform. Best for seeing what shipped this week, with real early-user comments.
Caveat: Rankings reflect launch-day upvote campaigns, not whether a product survives six months.
Startup portfolios
Who's building, and who serious investors think is worth backing.
Y Combinator startup directory
Every YC company, filterable by batch, industry, and region: 880+ AI companies and the single best free window into what early-stage founders are building right now.
Caveat: Early-stage means most will pivot or die. A listing is not an endorsement of maturity.
AI Grant
Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross's seed program. Short list, extremely high hit rate; alumni include Perplexity and Cursor.
Caveat: Dormant between batches; it updates only when a new batch lands.
a16z portfolio
Andreessen Horowitz's portfolio browser, filterable by AI and sector, showing which companies the biggest AI investor backed.
Caveat: It's the firm's own marketing surface, and obviously not neutral.
Techstars portfolio
Thousands of companies since 2007, with breadth and geography the Bay Area accelerators don't have.
Caveat: Better for looking up a company than browsing, and quality varies far more than YC's.
Rankings and leaderboards
For the perennial question: which model is best right now?
Arena (formerly LMArena)
Blind head-to-head model battles voted on by millions of users; leaderboards for text, web dev, agents, and image.
Caveat: It measures what people like, and likability is a different test from accuracy. Labs have also been accused of gaming it.
Artificial Analysis
Independent benchmarking of hundreds of models and providers: intelligence, speed, cost, latency, on hard numbers.
Caveat: Benchmark scores don't guarantee fit for your task.
a16z Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps
Twice-yearly ranking by real web traffic and mobile actives, which surfaces what normal people use day to day.
Caveat: A snapshot published twice a year, by a VC with portfolio companies on the list.
Hugging Face: models and Spaces
The open-source side: nearly three million models plus runnable demos, trending by default.
Caveat: A firehose built for practitioners. Without a specific goal, non-technical visitors will drown.
Watch the frontier
Newsletters and reports that keep you current without a research habit.
The Rundown AI
The most polished daily AI digest, 2M+ subscribers, and the easiest single subscription to recommend campus-wide.
Caveat: Breathless framing and heavy sponsor placement. Read it for the headlines and discount the adjectives.
State of AI Report
The annual open-access deep briefing on AI research, industry, politics, and safety. Excellent for anyone who wants the full landscape with citations.
Caveat: Roughly 250 dense slides from an investor's vantage point. Plan a full evening for it.
Hugging Face Papers
Trending AI research linked to code, and the official successor to Papers with Code, which shut down in 2025.
Caveat: Community upvotes skew toward LLM topics.
alphaXiv
A readable layer over arXiv: paper feeds with summaries, discussion, and Q&A, for people who want primary sources without raw arXiv.
Caveat: AI-generated summaries flatten nuance. Good for triage; read the paper before you cite it.
For education
The one credible higher-ed-specific directory that exists.