English
The Living Book of AI
AI explained clearly, and updated as it changes. Written from Europe.
This is the English half of a project that has been running in Italian for a year at librovivoia.it.
A book about artificial intelligence is trying to be two things at once: a map of how the technology works, which changes over years, and a forecast of what is currently the case, which changes weekly. Printed together, the second one discredits the first. So they are split. The map stays in print. The forecast lives online, updated continuously, and what proves durable is absorbed back into the next printed edition.
The Italian edition has been through that cycle three times in a year - a second edition in April 2026, a third in June, and a fourth, rewritten from scratch, published on 26 September 2026. The English edition runs on an annual cycle: its rewrite, aligned to that fourth edition, is in production, and the date goes here when the print file exists.
What you get: the layer underneath the news, explained as clearly as I can manage, from a European vantage point - where the AI Act is a compliance schedule rather than a topic for commentary, and where adoption happens inside organisations that cannot move quickly.
No hype and no dismissal. No number I have not checked. Corrections stay visible.
The pieces
They live on Substack: free, dated, no paywall. Between the printed editions, this is where the book keeps moving - what the news leaves out, what a paper actually says, what a model can and cannot do.
The Italian archive is going out in English one piece at a time, in the order it was written, and new pieces follow as they are written.
The book
Artificial Intelligence: how it actually works. A complete guide for readers starting from zero.
No programming or mathematics required. Neural networks, language models, agents, and what any of it changes for the organisation you work in.
A clear note on editions
The English edition on sale today is still the first one, from August 2025. The foundations remain useful, but the parts about agents and reasoning models show their age. The rewrite, aligned to the fourth Italian edition of September 2026 and written against the Italian master rather than simply translated from it, is in production. If you would rather wait for it, the Substack announces it the day it is out.
The book’s slides
The new edition of the book chapter by chapter, in 235 slides: the opening of each chapter, the concepts, the book’s figures, the data with their sources and the QR codes to the pages that are kept up to date. Revised on 27 September 2026. Free: leave your email and the download links appear.
Who writes it
Francesco Masera. I work in international development finance, and I write about AI in the evenings and at weekends. That is why I am sceptical of demonstrations and interested in constraints: the question I deal with at work is never what a model can do, but what it changes for an organisation that has to justify every euro.
The thinking, the thesis of each piece and every editorial decision are mine. The drafting runs through a newsroom of AI agents I direct - drafting, copy, desk, pictures. I check the numbers myself, against the sources. Corrections stay visible.
So: original in content and in judgement, drafted with heavy use of advanced AI tools. I say so here because the argument of the whole project is that a text should be judged by someone who knows how it was made.
The Italian site
Every piece I have published in Italian since August 2025, dated, free to read.
librovivoia.it