AINews

AINews is a smol.ai publication that summarizes discussions from AI Discord communities, Reddit communities and Twitter/X accounts into weekday roundups. Its products include an email newsletter and a searchable issue archive. In January 2026, it joined Latent Space, adding daily AI updates and commentary to a subscription that also includes podcasts and essays.[2][3][4]

The newsletter and archive preceded the Latent Space integration: AINews had operated as a Buttondown MVP for a little over a year when it announced a platform migration in April 2025.[3]

AINews initially used Buttondown, the email service by Justin Duke. In its April 25, 2025 announcement, the smol.ai team recalled that the MVP lasted longer than expected and that its signup page appeared on Lex Fridman thanks to a shoutout from @levelsio.[3]

The team moved to a custom Resend + Vercel + SmolTalk stack to improve signup, email deliverability and the web experience; SmolTalk was explicitly described as forthcoming. The announcement directed readers to news.smol.ai and promoted “fast, faceted search.” It also asked readers to rescue the new sender’s emails from spam, reflecting a delivery concern during the transition rather than a measured improvement.[3]

On January 23, 2026, swyx (Shawn) announced AINews joining Latent Space and welcomed a reported 80,000 AINews subscribers. The decision brought daily AINews, weekly Latent Space podcasts and broader essays into one Substack subscription, with readers able to opt in or out of the formats. February and July issues subsequently identified AINews as a Latent Space section.[4][1][5]

In the same announcement, swyx described financial support for the broader AI Engineer and Latent Space work as donations, partly from investors, while saying operating expenses came from Substack subscribers.[4]

AINews combines editorial commentary with platform-specific recaps. Its February 10, 2026 issue included Twitter, Reddit and Discord sections; the Discord recap was labeled “A summary of Summaries of Summaries by gpt-5.2,” identifying the model used for that recap.[1]

For its February 6–9 coverage, that issue reported checking 12 subreddits, 544 Twitter accounts and 24 Discords spanning 255 channels and 21,172 messages. It estimated 1,753 minutes of reading time saved using a rate of 200 words per minute. These are issue-specific input counts and a calculated estimate, rather than measured reader savings. The July 23 issue, covering July 21–22, reported the same subreddit and Twitter counts but “no further Discords” for that roundup.[1][5]

The AINews homepage advertises an audience of “over 150k top AI Engineers.” That promotional audience statement does not define its measurement and is distinct from the 80,000 subscribers reported in January 2026.[2][4]