AI Explained

AI Explained is a YouTube channel based in London, England, created and hosted by a British creator who goes by Philip (publicly identified only as Philip L). The channel launched in early 2023 and quickly built an audience around its approach of applying journalistic rigor to AI coverage without hype or sensationalism. Philip's stated mission is to provide hype-free AI journalism at a moment when the field increasingly needs it, covering the arrival of increasingly capable AI systems with clarity and analytical depth.

The channel covers a wide range of AI topics: major model releases from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta; LLM benchmark performance and its limitations; AI safety and alignment research; and the broader societal implications of transformative AI. Philip is known for producing thorough breakdowns of AI research papers and for investigative content on how frontier AI systems actually perform.

In August 2024, Philip released SimpleBench, a multiple-choice text benchmark designed to expose limitations in LLM reasoning. SimpleBench contains over 200 questions focused on spatio-temporal reasoning, social intelligence, and linguistic adversarial robustness. On the benchmark, a human baseline of 83.7% significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models including o1-preview (41.7%). The benchmark is hosted at simple-bench.com and was covered widely in AI media.

Philip also founded lmcouncil.ai, a multi-model workspace that allows users to compare simultaneous responses from multiple frontier AI systems (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and others). He runs an AI Insiders community of over 1,000 professionals across 30 industries, authors the Signal to Noise newsletter, hosts the AI Explained Official Podcast, and teaches a Coursera course on AI terminology.

The channel had approximately 410,000 subscribers and 19.7 million total views as of early 2026, with 144 videos published. It is funded through YouTube ad revenue and Patreon memberships, with 1,251 paid Patreon members across two tiers ($9/month for AI Insiders content and $29/month for additional podcast and direct messaging access). No institutional grants from EA-aligned funders (SFF, LTFF, Open Philanthropy) were found.