6 ms·
Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs
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.
- verdverm 4mo agoThis is decent on history, good on contemporary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R83pFpUWyM 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?)
- lyfeninja 4mo agoBelow 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 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
- haruka9527 4mo agoBookmarking this for later. I had a similar agent debugging mess last week.
- A_D_E_P_T 4mo agoBelieve 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/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552691/large-language-models...
- gabrielsroka 4mo agoMaybe https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbg3ZX2pWlgKV8K6bFJr5dhM7oOClExUJ https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbg3ZX2pWlgKV8K6bFJr5dhM7... Which contains "The 35 Year History of ChatGPT" and "How LLMs Took Over The World"
- haruka9527 4mo ago[dead]