Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs

[menomatter]

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.

[lyfeninja]

Below 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.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

[gabrielsroka]

Maybe https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbg3ZX2pWlgKV8K6bFJr5dhM7...

Which contains "The 35 Year History of ChatGPT" and "How LLMs Took Over The World"

[A_D_E_P_T]

Believe 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...

[verdverm]

This 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?)

[dserban]

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.

[tinktank]

Is the youtube link correct?

[haruka9527]

Bookmarking this for later. I had a similar agent debugging mess last week.