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