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.

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

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

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

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...

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?)

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