AI from first principles has not changed. Fundamentally it is: neural nets, transformers and RL. The most important paper in recent years is on CoT [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11903] and I'm not even sure what comes close. And I think what's more important these days is knowing how to filter the noise from the signal.

This is probably one of the better blogs I have read recently that shows the general direction currently in AI which are improvements on the generator / verifier loop: https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/11/13/alphaproof-paper/