Does anyone have suggestions for a book or an article that goes over the modern history of ML/LLM and how the field reached the inflection point that paved the path to the current state.
Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
1–9 of 9 posts
Re: Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
#2This is decent on history, good on contemporary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R83pFpUWyM
roughly
1. word2vec ('13)
2. transformers ('18)
3. chatgpt ('22)
4. claude code, i.e. tools / bash (mid '25)
5. llms trained for agentic workflow (nov '25)
6. cost reckoning ('26)
7. open weight models break the financial models of Big Ai ('26?)
Re: Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
#3Below is the "Attention is all you need" paper. Transformers and their attention mechanism was the major breakthrough for modern LLMs. ML has been around for a long time, I'd suggest joining kaggle or something and learn by doing. You'll retain more and realize how broad the category is anymore.
Re: Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
#4Bookmarking this for later. I had a similar agent debugging mess last week.
Re: Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
#5Believe it or not, there is none.
Somebody ought to write it.
This is probably closest, but it's not an entertaining narrative history, more of a reference: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552691/large-language-models...
Re: Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
#6Maybe
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbg3ZX2pWlgKV8K6bFJr5dhM7...
Which contains "The 35 Year History of ChatGPT" and "How LLMs Took Over The World"
Re: Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
#7[dead]
Re: Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
#8This is decent on history, good on contemporary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R83pFpUWyM roughly 1. word2vec ('13) 2. transformers ('18) 3. chatgpt ('22) 4. claude code, i.e. tools / bash (mid '25) 5. llms trained for agentic workflow (nov '25) 6. cost reckoning ('26) 7. open weight models break the financial models of Big Ai ('26?)
Adding to your 6 and 7, Ed Zitron's Better Offline podcast has a good series on how the path was paved to the cost reckoning of the present day.
Re: Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
#9This is decent on history, good on contemporary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R83pFpUWyM roughly 1. word2vec ('13) 2. transformers ('18) 3. chatgpt ('22) 4. claude code, i.e. tools / bash (mid '25) 5. llms trained for agentic workflow (nov '25) 6. cost reckoning ('26) 7. open weight models break the financial models of Big Ai ('26?)
Is the youtube link correct?