Ask HN: A Brief History of LLMs

9 points by menomatter ↗ HN
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.

8 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] thread
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?)

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.
Is the youtube link correct?
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

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